Picture this: you're meeting with a client, and they mention that after an amazing beach vacation they're thinking about purchasing a beach home. Rather than telling them you'll need to rerun some numbers and follow up later, Timeline for Retirement Maps allows you to skip the tedious fact-finding and get straight to the visuals. With Timeline, you can instantly measure the impact of your client's goals on their likelihood of sustaining income throughout retirement.
In This Article
Getting Started
To begin, navigate to the client Retirement Map you'd like to add events to.
Before getting started with Timeline, you'll need to populate a client's Retirement Map. Doing this is as simple as confirming your client's investment amount (as of today), retirement year, monthly withdrawal (at retirement), and their birth year (available by clicking on the Assumptions dropdown). For more on Retirement Map basics, check out our Knowledge Base article.
Note: For pre-retirees, we recommend adding a client's projected monthly savings amount. In addition to this, you can also enter an assumed annual increase in this savings amount, within the Assumptions section.
Creating a New Event
To add an event to the Timeline, click the Create Event button located in the bottom left-hand corner of a client's Retirement Map or simply click anywhere along the X-Axis of the map to add an event at that date.
You have the ability to add three unique types of events:
- Deposit Events: Whether your clients are expecting a major bonus, they're planning to cash in some company stock options, or you simply want to model their Social Security income, Deposit Events allow you to illustrate the impact of money coming in.
- Withdrawal Events: Easily visualize the effect of major purchases - second homes, boats, or sending the kids to college - on the probability of retiring with enough money.
- Portfolio Risk Adjustment Events: Risk capacity and risk tolerance don't always line up with the risk you need to take, and as clients approach retirement, it's common to dial down the risk in their portfolio. Risk Number® Adjustment events allow you to model this adjustment in portfolio risk.
Note: Timeline events assume an equal impact across the investable accounts in a portfolio.
Event Properties
For both Deposit and Withdrawal events you can specify the following:
- Amount (in dollars)
- Frequency: Events can either be one-time (Does not repeat) or they can recur on a monthly or annual basis. A good example of recurring events would be monthly social security or annual college tuition. Additionally, for your clients that buy new cars every 5 years, you'll also have the ability to create events that recur at a custom frequency.
- Start Date: You can specify the month and year an event will occur or commence.
- Duration: For recurring events, you can also specify a duration. By default, we'll assume a recurring event recurs indefinitely at the specified frequency (Does not end), but you can also specify the number of years you'd like a recurring event to repeat before it ends. The event duration will also be limited within the scope of the forecasted lifetime being modeled within Retirement Maps.
For Risk Number® Adjustment events, you'll simply adjust the Risk Number® of the portfolio up or down as you'd like, and specify a date that you'd like to model this change taking place. For this event type, we'll calculate a projected Rate of Return and Volatility based on the Risk Number® you specify, and model a generic re-allocation of the client's portfolio at the date you enter.
Interacting with Events on the Timeline
As soon as an event is created, it is placed on the X-Axis of Retirement Map, and the Retirement Map chart data is updated to reflect that event.
- All events are plotted based on their Start Date, but you can easily reveal the full range of recurring events by clicking on them to highlight their range on both the Timeline and within the Retirement Map.
- Clicking on an event will also reveal a detailed tooltip reviewing the details of the event.
- Within the detailed tooltip, you can very quickly edit both the event name and the dollar amount associated with an event. To edit further, simply click Edit from within the tooltip.
- Click on the visibility icon (the eye) in the bottom left-hand corner of the tooltip to illustrate a retirement map for the client that excludes an event. This option is great for goals a client or prospect is still considering.
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