In this video, you are going to witness how a basic financial plan can be built from end to end, in just 5 minutes using Snap Projections financial planning software.
Canadian Financial Advisors, Planners, and Investment Managers are eligible to start a 14-day Free Trial of Snap Projections. Snap provides transparent, easy to use, and highly customizable financial planning software for Advisors.
The Video transcript and data entry details are as follows:
Snap Projections is a Canadian financial planning software platform.
We help great Financial Advisors grow their assets under management and receive more referrals through effective and transparent financial planning.
In the next five minutes, I’ll show you how quick and easy it is to set up a new client or prospect and answer key questions such as, “Am I going to be okay?”
I’m setting up our new client, Anne Smith. Anne is 50 years old. She was born January 1st, 1972, and she resides in Ontario.
We’ll start Anne’s projections in January of 2023. She wants to retire when she’s 65, and we’ll show her projections until she turns 100.
We can enter in our own rates or use FP Canada’s most recent guidelines by clicking this button here.
Current employment income is $105,000. For Corporate income, you can access the corporate module here for comprehensive corporate planning capabilities.
Next we have our assets.
I’m going to delete the default account here for a fresh start, and we will set up all of Anne’s assets.
First we have the RRSP, current value is $150,000 and that is a 40/60 split.
Next we have the TFSA, current balance of $25,000. That’s the same balanced portfolio.
And lastly we have a savings account. This is currently sitting at $100,000. It’s a non-registered account and it is in 100% fixed. The RRSP is a group plan. Both Anne and her employer are currently contributing 5% of her annual salary.
And then we can set up the home. Current value is $800,000.
Next we’ll set up our mortgage for that property. Balance owing is currently $400,000 with a 5% interest rate. We are making monthly interest and principal payments of $2,500 and I will connect that to the home.
Just like that, we have entered in enough information!
We can now hop over to the main planning page and see the first draft of our plan.
On the left hand column here, we can see the after tax spending.
We can see what Anne is used to spending on her lifestyle expenses while she is working. When she turns 65, we’re going to enter into automatic cash flow management and we will enter in our own after tax spending target. And you can see that next year, Anne is going to spend about $42,000 after taxes.
So let’s see if she can afford to maintain her current lifestyle throughout retirement.
Any time you make a change on the main planning page, you’re just going to click “run scenario”. That’s essentially your calculator button.
Now we can see quite quickly here that if Anne spends $42,000 per year after taxes, adjusted for inflation, she is going to run out of money when she is 79. She is going into the pink, which means we have completely depleted her capital assets.
I’m going to open up the Recommendations tab here. We can use this feature as a discussion tool to explore optimizations live with our client.
We can calculate the sustainable spend and show Anne how much she can afford to spend without running out of money.
We can run the required savings calculator and show Anne the additional annual savings required if we want to meet that spending goal. We could easily apply and run all of these options.
With just a few clicks, I’m building out a new plan that models the sustainable spend recommendation. Now you’re probably wondering if you can create your own withdraw strategy. And the answer to that question is yes, you have complete control over the logic here.
We call this cash-flow management and I will enable it now, simply by clicking this button.
The default logic that Snap follows is based on reducing the client’s taxes in each given year. This optimization works well for many cases, but you can easily modify this to align with what you want to optimize for.
I’m going to copy the scenario and I’m simply going to click into my order of withdraws and select the order I want.
Let’s do registered, TFSA, non-registered.
I’ll copy that down until age 100, click “run scenario” and we now have a new drawdown logic to review and our third what if scenario.
So next, what if Anne is worried that we won’t get the rate of return that we’ve planned for? What I’m going to show you now is Snap’s Stress Testing feature.
You can introduce variability into the rates of return for your scenarios based on randomized or historical data. What you’re looking at here represents our first default option of a randomized scenario. I’ll click “apply and run” and you can now see varying rates of return throughout the projections.
Each plan that you create will produce its own report.
I’m going to return to the sustainable spend and I’ll show you what that looks like. The report is completely customizable to the level of detail your clients wish to see.
And Advisors tell us that this interactive source of income chart is an absolute client favourite.
Please note:
Although this is a fairly recent video, we have made numerous updates to the software since it was filmed. Snap’s Product Team works diligently to continue to develop the new features and capabilities our users are asking for.
For example, since this was recorded:
- The Report Builder has been updated to be even more customizable
- The new FHSA (First Home Savings Account) is now available
- There have been updates to the main planning page
Be sure to Subscribe to Snap’s YouTube channel if you want to see what the next new capability will be!
