Planning for Early Retirement? You NEED to use ProjectionLab

Intro:

I first discovered ProjectionLab thanks to Mad Fientist. If you haven’t checked out his blogs or podcast: you should. He’s one of the first voices I was introduced to in the FIRE community and he’s interviewed individuals and couples approaching FIRE in every way: real estate, index funds, hotels, you name it.

ProjectionLab is a financial planning software that is specifically built for Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE). It’s smart, intuitive, and honestly beautiful to look at.

When I first discovered ProjectionLab I still had a lot of the basic goals to hit: I needed to pay off credit card debts and establish my emergency fund. Even so, I became obsessed with the software. Here’s why:

The software:

ProjectionLab features the following:

• Finance Tracking: start from where you’re at right now. You can input all of your current finances and update it whenever you like to track your progress. This serves you in a couple ways:
  • If you don’t already use a budget tracker or net worth tracker like Personal Capital, Rocket Money, you may not be aware of your Net Worth. I personally find it really nice to view and track over time. All this data is input by you without any access to your financial institution – this is more work, but if you’re obsessed like me, you’ll look forward to doing it each month. I personally input mine once a month, once I’ve made payments on all my loans and all my investments are in place for the month.
  • Attach your progress across savings, investments, real assets, and unsecured debts to account entities within the software. Once you’ve done this, all of your plans can be built from this starting point. This is really powerful as your plans become very realistic based on this data.
• Plans: if you’re anything like me, you know there’s 10 different ways you can approach FIRE. I am constantly trying to maximize my efficiency pursuing these goals and it would truly be impossible without ProjectionLab. How do you determine if saving for a house first will be more profitable than putting all of that money in your retirement accounts?
  • Interest Rates and Inflation: ProjectionLab lets you customize the expected rate of return on your investments. Additionally, you can modify the rate of inflation to your liking as well. This allows you to build out multiple plans.
  • Expense and Income Growth: On top of inflation, you can modify the rate at which your expenses will grow if you predict that you will experience some lifestyle inflation over time. You can set how much you want your income to grow year over year as well.
  • Asset Appreciation/Depreciation:
    Do you own a nice car that you believe will appreciate over time?
    Set that in ProjectionLab.
    How about a Jeep that won’t hold value?
    Set depreciation in ProjectionLab.
    Do you believe that housing prices have increased at a more rapid rate in the last 10 years than they will in the next 10 years?
    Set that in ProjectionLab.
    
    Like Doctor Strange, you can predict every possible outcome and adjust accordingly.
  • Cash Flow Priorities: This has to be my favorite feature by far. You can use all of those real accounts you setup by inputting your current finances and determine which you would like to contribute to, in which order, and how much you would like to contribute.
    
    This is extremely powerful. With a quick adjustment to the order of your priorities you can see how your plan changes when you max out your 401K first, or save to your house fund first.
    
    If you want to try something in the middle, like saving to a maximum of $1000 a month in your house fund and then contributing the rest to your 401K, this software lets you do that. On top of that, you can set each of these goals to start and end based on other goals, allowing you to start your second house fund once you’ve finished the first (if you’re interested in being a landlord), or start maxing out your 401K only after you’ve paid off all of your student loans. There’s so many ways to look at the future with this software and you can make the rates, income levels, and and expenses as conservative or generous as you’d like.

Summary:

ProjectionLab offers the above and so much more. I’ll continue to detail how I’m using the software to reach and adjust my goals as I journal my financial journey. I highly recommend you check it out.

Once you do, let me know what you think!

Best,

Noah P.

Disclaimer: As is stated on my home page and with all links on my site, many of these links will be affiliate links and I may receive a kickback for your clicks or purchases. These proceeds will be used to support the infrastructure hosting the site.

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Affiliate links present on this page:

• ProjectionLab

The following links are not affiliate links as of 05/26/2024:

• Personal Capital, Rocket Money