How this works
Name each amount, say whether it comes in or goes out, how often it lands, and how much. A loan works out its own repayments, an investment grows at the rate you give it, and something you own simply holds its value. Give an amount a rate and it climbs by that much every year.
Anything less frequent than monthly lands at the end of each period — a yearly amount at month 12, 24, and so on.
Amounts are in your own currency — the app never converts or stores them anywhere but this device.
How money behaves
These apply to every plan at once, which is what keeps two plans worth comparing.
Projected totals
Net after 24 months
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- Total income
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- Total expenses
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- Kept per month, on average
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- Things you own are worth
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- You still owe
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- Paid into investments
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- Investments are worth
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- Net profit
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- Total after 24 months
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Cumulative over time
Give a field an amount to project the months ahead.
How this works
The flow charts share one vertical scale, so they can be read against each other. Month 0 is today: nothing earned, nothing paid — though what you already own and already owe counts from the start. Money put into an investment counts as paid out; what it is worth is a balance, not a flow, so that card carries its own scale. The total sits back on the shared scale, so the gap between it and the net is everything the balance sheet adds.
When does that happen?
How this works
A target is a figure to watch for, not a rule the plan obeys: the projection runs as it always has and the app reads off the first month the plan you are looking at is there. Switch plans and every answer is worked out again.
How this works
A rule marks a month and nothing else. It is drawn in the same place on every card, because a month is a month, and it says nothing about the curve it happens to cross. A total that climbs past its figure and falls back again is marked once, where it first got there — the cards show the rest.
Only two figures can be worked backwards: an amount and a rate. More of either carries the answer one way and keeps carrying it, which is what lets a search bracket it and halve its way in. The month an investment is cashed in is not like that — moving it changes both what the holding grew to and what the cash then bought — and neither is a loan’s term, so neither is offered. Whatever comes back is put into the plan and run again before it is shown, and where it does not reach the target the app says so rather than naming it. Nothing here is ever written into your plan.
Where the money goes
How this works
Everything that comes in over the whole projection, pooled, and where it ends up. Only money that actually moves is here — what an investment grows to, or a flat gains, is on the cards above.
Strategies side by side
What moves the needle
How this works
This is what your plan is sensitive to over the length you are reading it at, not a general truth about money. Pull the projection out and the order changes: the three plans the app opens with swap theirs somewhere between twenty years and forty.
The swings do add up. Every amount enters the model on its own, so moving two of them moves the figure by both, to the cent — and that is exactly the limit of the list rather than a flaw in it: it will rank a mortgage and the house it bought one above the other without ever being able to say they were one decision. Profit is the exception, because the tax falls on the gain as a whole rather than on each part of it.