Plan Your Money Path

Welcome to the start of the rest of your life-the one where you aren't wandering in the (financial) dark without a flashlight. The one where you have a clear roadmap to your future, and mathematical confidence that you and your family can have the kind of life you dream of! This book contains thousands of dollars worth of professional financial planning advice, hints, tips, and hacks. This book shows you how to take control and build your own financial plan, using high fidelity, inexpensive software, not the simplistic financial/retirement planning tools you find all over the internet. I'll take you through some important general financial planning context, and then through the steps to building a financial plan for a sample family. Along the way, we'll discuss the different inputs and assumptions required for any financial plan, as well as how to interpret the results and put your plan into action. This book will first take you through some general financial planning context, and then take you through the steps to building a financial plan for a sample family. Along the way, we'll discuss the different inputs and assumptions required for any financial plan, as well as how to interpret the results and put your plan into action. I'll minimize the use of screen shots, as they're quickly outdated and a detriment to those who need to or prefer to listen to audiobooks. I won't use them for pages with just a few simple inputs. It will also help to apply this book to high-fidelity financial planning tools other than the one I use (Pralana). This is not a user manual for that tool. I won't go into every obscure nook and cranny of Pralana, because it would get boring and those side areas aren't relevant to most people. This book is more of a casual, informative walk through how to use the tool to set up a financial roadmap for the average household, using an average household as our example. It is how I would guide you, as a client, to learning and using the tool for your benefit. This is a book about creating your own financial plan, using a sample representative family and reviewing their configuration, optimization, and analysis. We cover the most commonly used settings, inputs, and assumptions, but simply can't delve into every seldom-used side case nook and cranny. The book would be quite unwieldy, not as useful, and certainly difficult to get through. The user manual is now built-in to the tool, context sensitive, comprehensive, and awesome, so please defer to it to clarify or add to anything in this book that you don't fully understand, as well as the extremely helpful user forum at the Pralana website. If you don't have a basic understanding of personal finance, investing, and retirement planning concepts, start with my companion book, Kiss Your Money Hello (and Financial Stress Goodbye). This theme of this book is simplicity, as you'll see. I didn't want to write a wieldy 400-page tome. I wanted something easily digestible, succinct, and to the point.