You can quickly create a financial plan with FarPlanner that considers many financial aspects at the same time. It’s like using many different financial calculators all at once.
Build Up Your Plan One Tracker at a Time
FarPlanner lets you build up you financial plan using ‘tracker’ widgets. Trackers track and estimate one aspect of your plan. For example, an account tracker tracks one of your account’s balances into the future. A ‘cash flow’ tracker mimics one of your income or expense flows (e.g., monthly electric bill) into the future.
FarPlanner considers all of your planned trackers together to forecast your future account balances and net worth. Trackers can start in the past or in the future in your plan.
FarPlanner organizes your plan under these major tabs:
Each of the circled tabs lets you add one or more ‘template trackers’. Template trackers group together many related trackers at once. For example, if you click on the ‘Your Homes‘ tab you can add a home tracker to your plan, you’ll see it’s grouped child trackers:
…including these child ‘cash flow’ trackers…
The home template tracker adds the child trackers above all at once to your plan:
- An ‘Asset’ tracker: Tracks the home asset’s appreciated market value over time.
- A ‘Loan’ tracker: Tracks mortgage principal balance left, monthly loan payments and tax-deductible interest.
- A ‘cash flow’ tracker mimicking small repair and maintenance expenses into the future.
- Another ‘cash flow’ tracker estimating annual property taxes as a % of market value. For the life of the home template tracker.
- A major expense (‘A/C Replacement’) ‘cash flow’ tracker. Every 10 years into the future by default.
- Several other home-related expenses not shown.
Each tracker has reasonable default amounts out of the box. You can edit the values of each tracker to suit your plan’s needs. You can even add your own child trackers, including loan refinance trackers and other expenses.
After FarPlanner forecasts your plan into the future, you can view estimates for each tracker:
You can also import your actual finances (e.g., via QIF and CSV files) to track and extend current expense/income into the future. These actuals can be matched to the trackers you added above, making them more realistic than the default values.
Organizing Your Plan’s Trackers
Under the ‘Your Family’ tab you can add multiple ‘person template’ trackers. You can add person trackers for your current and planned family members. For each person, these trackers group school and college expenses & loans, as well as salary income.
Under the ‘Your Automobiles and Boats’ tab you can add multiple ‘auto asset template’ trackers. You can add asset trackers for your current and planned cars and boats. For one asset, these trackers group depreciated asset market value, loan and related expense trackers.
The ‘Your Miscellaneous Items’ tab lets you add new income and expense categories. You can also change inflation rates.
FarPlanner Plans Around Your Trackers
FarPlanner builds a realistic plan and forecast custom-fit around the trackers you add. Beyond your plan’s trackers, FarPlanner also considers these aspects in forecasts:
- Taxes and RMDs
- Building emergency funds
- Paying down credit debt
- Account allocations across all your taxable/retirement/college accounts
Download and quickly build your FarPlanner plan for free today, one tracker at a time.