Projection Lab (2025-32)(40,42)
Decided to update our financials using Projection Lab. We’re still Premium Members until the 20th, so figured why not make a few more updates before we decide to call it quits and no longer renew with them.
Based on our assessment, Projection Lab is good with their concepts regarding FIRE, but still has plenty of issues with their calculations as most of them are defaulted and can’t be fixed, so it skews all of our results. Tax calculations on Taxable Income and Withdrawals are the main culprit. Currently, there is an input field for both of these categories, but the issue is when the input result changes based on our scenario for a specific period, eg no longer salaried or retired from workforce. Since the results are calculated and compounded, a miscalculated result in one year skews all of the remaining future years compounded as well. We also make extra contributions to our Mortgage repayments, so the results on mortgage interest are also skewed.
Our end goal is for us to rely on our investments income when Kathy is no longer working. We will be relying on our AU Investments, which would be tax free since the current taxable income thresh hold is 0% up to 18.2K for each individual. That means if both of us retire, we can have free taxable income up to 36.4K as Joint. The Projection Lab results are not reflecting this accurately. Once we reach our preservation Age of 60, we can receive our Superannuation withdrawals tax free. We’re also eligible to receive our US Social Security benefits by Age 62. Under the US-AU tax treaty, social security benefits are tax free. We are both eligible as we both have completed our 10 years of 40 work credits from the US prior to our relocation.
What we can utilize from Projection Lab is the concept when building our FIRE plan using Excel when creating our Financials Dashboard. Although we prefer to not fully rely on Excel, its still a great tool when consolidating our financials and that the results are reported accurately. I still haven’t decided yet if I plan to research and test using other platforms for our dashboards, or plan to create my own platform. We prefer to no longer have to use or rely on Excel and focus on automating our reporting on the Cloud.
