Getting Started: Expenses

Expenses have a big impact on a financial plan. Adviice is 'spending driven' which means we use your spending goals to drive how much income you need to take each year in retirement. This makes the Expenses Section one of the most important in your plan.

Simple vs Detailed

While we recommend creating a detailed "bottoms up" estimate using common spending categories, it is also possible to just include a high level spending number.

You can do this by clicking the Simple toggle in the left hand corner of the Expense Section

Building Your Expense Snapshots

Start by creating an estimate of your current monthly expenses in the column called "Current Expenses" and an estimate of your monthly retirement expenses in the column called "Retirement Expenses".

You can add additional snapshots to represent broad changes of expenses or multiple retirement phases (Go-Go, Slow-Go, No-Go).

Navigating Your Snapshots:

Once you have more than 3 expenses snapshots you will need to scroll horizontally using the arrows to see the additional expenses snapshots.

Filling in Expense Categories

Expenses will be added in four categories (and one optional category for rental property owners):

Fill in all the values that apply to you, enter $0 in the ones that do not.

Infrequent Expenses Estimate

The infrequent expenses estimate is for home owners or vehicle owners to help anticipate expenses that may only happen every few years. This includes home repairs/maintenance, vehicle replacement, and vehicle repairs/maintenance.

With a few inputs we can create a reasonable estimate for future expenses. The goal is to save monthly for these infrequent expenses. These amounts should be added to the Monthly Housing Expenses or the Monthly Transportation Expenses.

Tip: The infrequent expenses estimates are calculators to help you with finding values for these type of costs. They are not automatically included in your spending. To include them in your spending take the values from the calculator and enter them into the home maintenance, vehicle replacement and vehicle maintenance fields.

If you do not own a home or own a vehicle these options may be missing. If you feel this is an error please review your Profile settings to ensure you've indicated that you own a home and/or that you own a vehicle.

Drop Downs:

Expenses can be entered at different frequencies. You can see a legend for your options below:

/A = Per Annum
/SM = Per Semi-Annum (2x per year)
/Q = Per Quarter
/M = Per Month
/SM = Per Semi-Month (2x per month)
/BW = Per Bi-Weekly
/W = Per Weekly