A New Perspective: Your Financial Plan
After recently speaking with dozens of Finimizers (in addition to our Brainstorming & Beers sessions), we realized that we could improve Finimize MyLife (and financial plans in general) by adding more structure to the app. This gave the team the opportunity to explore different angles, through which we’ve adopted a new perspective for creating your initial plan.
Introducing Protect, Preserve, Live, and Grow.
The new flow allows the user to take a step back and mentally prepare for setting and planning their financial goals. It brings them into the mental space of thinking about their finances with four steps: Protect, Preserve, Live, and Grow.
After entering your basic info, you’ll go through a series of four steps to generate the start of your own personalized financial plan. Intuitively, protecting your money comes first, followed by preserving your future. The next phase is to select one or two life goals that you want to achieve (e.g. buying a house, moving countries, or both!) and lastly, in the Grow phase, we’ll help you focus on how to invest anything left over (more to come on this).
Protect.
Step one in the new flow is to allow users to set up an emergency fund. We’ll suggest an amount based on your monthly income. The rule of thumb is to save between two to six months of monthly expenses in case of emergency, or to have back up for a rainy day.
Preserve.
The next screen brings you to Preserve. After starting with a rainy day fund, we’ll encourage you to start a pension (or to add to an existing one) and begin setting aside cash each month.
Live.
The third stage of your financial plan encourages you to select at least one or two lifestyle goals. Whether you want to buy a house, save for an MBA or move to Sweden, this stage lets you choose a goal that resonates most with your dreams. Let your imagination go wild — what do you really want to achieve in life?
We show four options to start with: “buying my own place”, “living the dream”, “buying something big”, and “switching gears in life”. We’ll then ask you to prioritize which of those goals are most important to you before moving onward.
Grow.
The last stage of your plan encompasses aiming to grow what’s left of your money, and maximizing your overall net wealth. After you’ve protected your future and covered what you want to do in life, here’s where the fun stuff comes in — be it investing for the long term or looking to try something with more risk, like cryptocurrency.
That’s it — you’ve created a financial plan.
After a few minutes of work you’ll have generated your own personalized financial plan — something that can normally cost thousands of dollars.
What’s Next?
We’ve added more users this week and are happy to continue getting the next wave onto the platform! We’re also working on a new layout for the app that lays the groundwork for you to start tracking your goals 🙌
Speaking of which, if you’d like to see what we’re working on next drop me a line here for a sneak peek / user testing session! We’d love to have you come by the office or Skype us 😊
~Anna, Community at Finimize
