Financial Planning - does this service exist?

Financial Chat
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Hi everyone. I’ve been starting to do some proper financial planning recently. My focus isn’t on monthly income v. outgoings; I’ve reached a fairly stable lifestyle where I can save a certain amount per month and still enjoy life, and the Monzo Summary tab does a pretty good job of keeping me on track.

I’m wondering if there is an application/service out there that allows you to track your ‘financial health’ over longer time frames. Most of the applications/services out there (including Monzo) appear very short-term focused, working mostly on a monthly (or at most yearly) time frame.

For example, if you have:

  • cash savings of £y;
  • you’ve been paying into a pension for four years at x%;
  • your salary is £z annually;
  • you have a stocks and shares ISA of £p, with rough increases of s% per year; and
  • you occasionally earn some money on the side as a freelancer (or similar) and therefore fill out a self assessment, which works out at about £d per year, taxed at t%;

then your financial circumstances in 10 years suddenly gets quite complicated. Ideally you would factor in inflation, stock market fluctuations, etc, as well as the possibility of higher earnings over time.

The question I ultimately want to be able to answer (and doesn’t seem that difficult to answer?), is how financially secure/stable I’ll be in ten years, based on currently trajectory. If the answer is ‘not very’, then ideally you can start to make changes now.

My current solution is a relatively complicated Google Sheet, with IFTTT integration with Monzo, and manual entry for everything else. I wonder if anyone has come across a service that does this?

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I’ve not used it (yet!) myself, but am considering You Need a Budget. It looks pretty slick.

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Yeah this does look v. slick - thanks!

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Actuaries do this job, and it’s extremely difficult. No one can predict the future in economic terms, even the Chancellor admits that.

Without turning this into yet another Brexit discussion, the fact that there’s an event scheduled to happen to our society in four months from which no one is able to predict how our economy will change points to the fact that a decade is too long to accurately forecast.

In just 12 years the economy and society has had to deal with the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit, neither of which were foreseen. Imagine asking your question on September 10th 2001.

Best of luck!