Super DIY Calculator (Brainstorming with AI)
We’re deciding on creating our own Super DIY Calculator tailored to our needs. There are many Super Retirement Calculators out there, but most of them focus on projecting balances only, which would be nice, but not suitable for us. We’re more interested on knowing when our contributions would equal to our growth, projection balance both for retirement age (we plan to retire early), and projection balance by preservation age (age 60).
Another pressing question that none of the super calculators were able to answer was how much of additional contributions would we need to make to meet our annual desired spending without running out of money?
Another factor is that most super calculators, although they do ask for mine, and my spouse Super individually, they have fixed fields which require a response, but not all fields are applicable, so therefore, the projection results would also be skewed. If we choose to stop working and contributing to our supers by a certain age, that should be our choice, not all fixed to preservation age which is age 60. Also, most calculators only reflect concessional contributions based on salary, but not many account for non-concessional contributions such as for my super. Once again, should be a choice.
Most Financial Planners and most projection models suggest to run their models using a 30-year horizon, and therefore, shooting up the projections in millions by the time we’re age 75+. We only focus on a 3-to-5 year horizon when forecasting. Based on our conversations with a few potential financial advisors/planners during our discovery meeting, they all wanted us to fully invest our funds with them and tell us how our funds should be managed. Really? No thanks. We plan to retire early and none of them understood that concept.
Regarding super retirement calculators, most calculators estimates that we should have millions by age 75+, but we prefer to focus on utilizing the funds ourselves as the most optimal solution. We have other core assets outside of super, so focusing solely on super alone isn’t justified. We don’t agree with the approach of passing away with more money in our super either. We’ve earned it, so we should utilize it however method we would like to. We have other asset allocations to consider.
We also won’t be using Financial Planners to invest our funds under their AUM model so that they get paid no matter what happens in the market. We’ve started to train our kid on personal finances by Age 10, and we’ll teach him how to invest and to assist us in managing his trust account once he’s in high school. Once he’s in uni, we’ll train him to help us manage our personal finances and investment accounts. We’ll teach him how to become self sufficient. Most parents probably wouldn’t use this approach, but everyone’s parental styles are different. We have our own.
We’re integrating FinAI with our personal finances and investing and have been doing so for that past 2 years and we’ve stopped relying on Excel for almost everything. For now, we’re at the brainstorming phase. We’ll run some calculations on the backend, then do some more testing and factchecking the projections.
