About the Life Planning Simulator

The major financial decisions in life — buying a home, getting married, having children, starting a business, retiring — do not happen in isolation. They interact with each other and with your underlying income, savings rate, and investment returns to determine your long-term financial trajectory. The Life Planning Simulator lets you drag these events onto a personal timeline and instantly see how each decision shapes your projected net worth from today to retirement age.

How the simulation works

You start by entering your financial profile: current age, annual income, monthly expenses, existing savings, and expected investment return. The simulator then builds a baseline wealth projection — what your net worth would look like if nothing major changed. You then add life events by dragging them onto your timeline. Each event has financial parameters you can customise: the cost of a wedding, the income impact of having a child, the equity and mortgage of a home purchase, the startup costs and revenue growth of a business. The simulator recalculates the entire trajectory in real time, showing you how each event shifts your long-term outcome.

Life events modelled

• Home purchase: Models the down payment outflow, mortgage repayments, ongoing ownership costs, and long-term equity accumulation and appreciation.
• Marriage: Can model both the cost of a wedding and the financial benefits of a dual-income household with shared expenses.
• Children: Accounts for the significant cost of raising children — childcare, education, reduced working hours — and the long-term impact on savings capacity.
• Career change: Models income transitions, including potential short-term reductions during retraining or job searching and longer-term gains from career progression.
• Starting a business: Captures startup costs, the income-lean early years, and the potential for significant wealth creation if the business succeeds.
• Retirement: Models the transition from accumulation to drawdown, showing how your projected net worth sustains your desired retirement income.

Why life planning simulations matter

Most people plan their finances one decision at a time: they think about whether they can afford a mortgage, or whether now is the right time to have children, without modelling how these decisions interact. A home purchase 3 years before children, for example, creates very different financial outcomes from the reverse — the order, timing, and sequencing of major life events significantly affects long-term wealth. This simulator makes those interactions visible so you can plan with a complete picture.

Important limitations to understand

• Investment returns are assumed to be smooth and constant — in reality, markets fluctuate significantly year to year. The projected trajectory is a central estimate, not a guarantee.
• Tax treatment of different income types, capital gains, and investment returns varies by country and individual circumstances and is simplified in this model.
• Life events often have non-financial impacts — on health, relationships, and happiness — that are as important as the financial numbers and cannot be captured in any model.
• Unexpected events (job loss, illness, divorce, economic downturns) are not modelled. A financial buffer of 3–6 months of expenses is recommended regardless of what the projections show.

How to use this tool most effectively

Start with your baseline projection to understand your current financial trajectory. Then add events in the order you are actually considering them and observe the impact of each one. Try alternative sequences — what if you delayed home purchase by 3 years? What if you had one fewer child? What if you started your business at 35 instead of 40? The simulator is most valuable when used to explore scenarios and build intuition about how financial decisions interact over a lifetime.