Why bother planning?

The best way to predict the future is to create it.  in 2015 Katie and I headed to Ecuador to go on Chautauqua, a financial independence retreat.  We were desperately trying to work out how to invest and whether to invest in pensions or not.  At the event we met the Mad Fientist who sat down with us and helped us to create our first ever financial model of our finances.  This gave us the confidence we could make it to Financial Independence, which pots to invest in and helped us really get going on our journey.  We have been developing that spreadsheet for the last 6 years and still come back to it every time we need to make big financial decisions. 

Course description and content

The subject:
How do you know if you will have enough money for retirement? How do you know if you will have enough available in different pots? (ISAs, SIPPS and other funds)  How do you know if you will end up spending more than you have?
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In this interactive workshop Katie and Alan will show you how build a spreadsheet to model your financial future.  This will help you to be able to understand how your savings and investments strategies affect your financial destiny over the decades. 

Come with spreadsheet open and build alongside Alan and Katie as we work together to chart out your potential financial futures and how the decisions you are making now affect future you. 

We will cover:

• Create from scratch a spreadsheet modelling your financial future
• Build in assumptions and who you how to stress test them
• Show you how to chart out age accessible funds to make sure you don't run out of money before you get to them
• Show you how to apply inflation to your spending
• Help you to predict your own retirement age
• Show you how to use the predictions to predict against the impact of the Pension Life Time Allowance in the UK
• How Katie and Alan use their financial model to test different strategies to find the impact over time and make choices based on maths not just emotion

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Katie Donegan

Katie is an excel and data nerd.  She LOVES numbers, maths and creating charts and graphs of financial data.  Katie did a degree in stats, qualified as an actuary and has spend the last few years modelling financial data.  

Alan Donegan

Alan loves financial independence, after meeting the Mad Fientist in Ecuador at Chautauqua he was inspired to work on a financial model that could predict their financial future and help work out if they would have enough to retire!

Objectives and pre-requisites

Course Objective
By the end of this course you will have the skills to build your own financial model to predict your financial future.  Come with Excel (or Google Sheets) open and build along as Alan and Katie guide you through creating your own spreadsheet live on the course.  You will be able to stress test predictions for different scenarios and have more confidence that you won't run out of money. 

Course Pre-requisites​

• Excel skills - you know how to use formula, lay out a simple spreadsheet and can navigate excel or google sheets
• Basic Financial independence knowledge - we will not be covering index funds, 4% rule or other basic FI principles in this course rather we will spend our time teaching you how to model them in excel to predict your financial future.