Microsoft Money - Lifetime Planner

Snot

Hi,  I've been using MS Money for years but it was only during lockdown I started to look at the Lifetime Planner report. Whilst it's interesting to change the future growth & inflation values, I don't really know what I'm doing. Clearly garbage in equals garbage out; but does anybody else actively use it to plan their retirement and if so do you have any tips ?

I do use Excel for various saving & retirement scenarios but I like MS Money as it has all my historical spend, which should give me an accurate idea of what my retirement income needs to be.

cloud_dog

Hi...I have used MM Money for a couple of decades but TBH, I've never really got in to the Lifetime Planner.  I played a little with it in the early days but wasn't really focussed on strategic thinking back then.

I may have a play with it and see if I can offer anything.

Linton

Snot said:

Hi,  I've been using MS Money for years but it was only during lockdown I started to look at the Lifetime Planner report. Whilst it's interesting to change the future growth & inflation values, I don't really know what I'm doing. Clearly garbage in equals garbage out; but does anybody else actively use it to plan their retirement and if so do you have any tips ?

I do use Excel for various saving & retirement scenarios but I like MS Money as it has all my historical spend, which should give me an accurate idea of what my retirement income needs to be.

I use Ms Money Lifetime Planner for daily monitoring of my expenditure and investment values for long term sustainability.  For detailed annual planning I use a spreadsheet.

The strategy I use is to assume what would now be considered a high rate of inflation of 3% and a low return on investments of 4% in £ terms.  Then  annual expenditure is adjusted to leave a specific figure at the end of the plan to cover care costs and leave a good margin for safety.  As long as actual expenditure is well within plan there is no need to worry.  Also it provides the ability to assess whether next year's major one-off expenditures eg world cruise, new kitchen etc, are affordable.

One tip - the tax calculations are not right for the UK.  What I do is to tweak the % tax, whether a particular income is taxable or not etc so that the annual MsMoney calculated tax matches as closely as possible the exact calculation from the spreadsheet.

westv

It's been years since I last used MS Money. When I did the lifetime planner was a bit of a novelty for me.
Now I think I might have found it more useful I have a Chromebook which doesn't run it.

Snot

Linton said:

One tip - the tax calculations are not right for the UK.  What I do is to tweak the % tax, whether a particular income is taxable or not etc so that the annual MsMoney calculated tax matches as closely as possible the exact calculation from the spreadsheet.

Thanks Linton,  that made me realise I only enter Net income, I now notice there is a Category called Payslip which allows income to be split into Tax, NI, Pension contributions etc. Clearly I still have plenty to figure out.

Linton

Snot said:

Linton said:

One tip - the tax calculations are not right for the UK.  What I do is to tweak the % tax, whether a particular income is taxable or not etc so that the annual MsMoney calculated tax matches as closely as possible the exact calculation from the spreadsheet.

Thanks Linton,  that made me realise I only enter Net income, I now notice there is a Category called Payslip which allows income to be split into Tax, NI, Pension contributions etc. Clearly I still have plenty to figure out.

Yes, it is very useful as you can create a year end tax report which includes all money earned, drawn down, received as a pension etc  and actual tax paid.