About LifeScope

What is it for?

Most of the big questions about the future are money questions underneath.

• Can we buy the house and still have children?

• What would a year off really cost?

• If an inheritance arrives, what does it change?

• Could I step back at fifty, or is it later than that?

LifeScope answers them the same way each time: it runs your life forward with the change and without it, and shows you the difference. When you could stop working is one of the things it shows. It is not the only thing it is about.

Who built it, and why?

It is built in New Zealand by one person who lived the problem it solves. A working life spread across more than one country, with savings and entitlements in each, and one simple question that nothing could answer: taken together, what does all of this add up to, and what would change it?

The tools that existed each saw part of the picture. None of them could see all of it at once, and none of them showed their working. So this was built: first to answer that question properly, and then because it turned out a great many people have the same one.

What was missing?

Most planning tools assume you have lived in one country. They ask for a balance and an age, and give an answer built on one set of rules.

That breaks the moment a life does not fit. A KiwiSaver here and super there. A pension one country pays and another deducts. An account you can reach at 60 in one place and 65 in another. Ask a New Zealand tool about a 401(k) and it has no idea what you mean. Ask an American one about NZ Superannuation and it has never heard of it.

So people end up running two or three tools that each ignore part of their life, and adding up answers that were never meant to be added.

How is it kept right?

A plan is only worth having if its numbers are right, so the rule this was built by is simple: nothing in it is guessed. Getting there took far longer than an estimate would have. Every rule was read at its source rather than taken from someone's summary of it, and wherever an answer would have been easier to approximate, it was traced to the rule instead.

• Every figure the calculator uses is written down with where it came from. Each tax bracket, contribution rule, access age and pension rate is taken from the legislation or the agency that administers it, with the date it was read.
• The figures are checked each quarter, on the dates the rules change. The tool's own automated tests fail if that check is ever more than four months old, so it cannot quietly go stale.
• Only official sources count. Legislation first, then the agency that administers it, then a regulator, then official statistics. Nothing from a bank, a fund, an adviser, a scheme or a commentator is cited, however well written.
• Where nothing official exists, it says so. The guides list what no source publishes beside the sources they do cite, rather than filling the gap with a figure.

The whole method, and a deliberate list of what the model does not do, is set out on the methodology page. If you find anything on this site that its source does not support, that is a defect, and worth reporting as one.

Who is it for?

Anyone who wants to see where their life is heading and what they could do about it, whether the question is five years away or fifty. It takes one person or a couple, in one country or across New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

It was built with crossed borders in mind. New Zealanders who spent a decade in Sydney or San Francisco. Australians who came the other way. Americans who married a New Zealander and stayed. People still deciding where to settle. Money in more than one of those countries is where other tools give up, and where this one starts.

It is built for someone doing their own thinking rather than for an adviser. Everything it says about a rule is traceable to the rule.

What does it actually do?

It runs a year-by-year simulation of a household, from now to as far ahead as you choose. In each year it adds what you earn and save, grows each account at the rate chosen for it, takes tax on the relevant country's brackets, adds any government pension you have reached the age for, and takes out what you spend.

Along the way you can add the big moments. Each one shows what it does to the rest of the plan, including how soon you could stop working if you wanted to.

• A child
• Buying a home
• Renovation
• Downsizing
• Moving
• A big purchase
• A trip
• A break from work
• Money in
• A health event

Underneath, it carries KiwiSaver, Australian super, 401(k)s and traditional and Roth IRAs, in their own currencies, with their own access ages and their own contribution rules, and NZ Superannuation, the Australian Age Pension and United States Social Security. Two people can have different countries, different accounts and different plans for work, in one household.

And the guides?

The guides came out of building the model. Answering questions like whether an Australian pension is deducted from NZ Superannuation meant reading the legislation, and it turned out there was nowhere sensible to send anyone who wanted the same answer.

So they are published, to the same standard as the calculator, and no commercial provider or fund is named anywhere in them.

Where is it up to?

The guides are open to read. The tool itself is not open to everyone yet, and there is a waitlist rather than a sign-up.

Nothing has been decided about what it will cost, so nothing is claimed about it here.