Building a life finance plan and model

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  1. #1

    Building a life finance plan and model

    I’m looking for resources to help me develop what I call a “life finances plan and model”. I’m not talking specifically about a traditional investment strategy where a financial advisor introduces investment products to me, but something more fundamental and all encompassing of key life decisions and paths.

    Whilst I know for some, the advice would simply be “earn as much money as you can, spend as little as you can, and invest wisely” I don’t want to take such an open ended approach, particularly on the “earn as much as possible” aspect . I want to approach it more from a point of view of “if this is the kind of (potentially modest) life I’m seeking, with some key life decisions along the way, what kind of income trajectory would I need in order to live within this (including some contingency)”.

    In some ways I’m trying to develop a rough project plan and model for mine and my family’s life, and like any plan, I know it will change. But having some baseline is infinitely better than no baseline, and I believe in doing this exercise, it helps give some perspective and inform the relative importance of certain immediate decisions and options. It’s just that there are so many variables and it’s such a complex situation (life and it’s potential possibilities) to plan and map, which is why I’m exploring what resources, books, people, other sources, that can help me build and manage such a plan. There’s also the added complication that as an expat to HK, many of the considerations unique to living here are not anything I have examples from other role models (ie parents / elders) that I can draw on - what I did for education as a child in my home country is potentially irrelevant to the financial planning for raising my own children in hk, for example.

    Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?


  2. #2

    Join Date
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    Search posts by me. Spent a lot of time going through this and I have documented lots of it here.

    I got burnt by an IFA selling me products BTW and around this time last year changed everything up.


  3. #3

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    Also look out for posts by Shri, jrkob, Brit, nivant, bdw, cedelrion to name a few.


  4. #4

    Thanks. Am keen to learn more from your experiences. There a lot of treads under your profile - can you point me to any specific ones relating to this?


  5. #5

    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by MidnightBaker:
    Thanks. Am keen to learn more from your experiences. There a lot of treads under your profile - can you point me to any specific ones relating to this?
    The one has mentioned.

    Along with maybe the following to start off with some links below (some recent threads). Then I suggest you go down the rabbit hole.

    https://geoexpat.com/forum/155/thread344956.html

    https://geoexpat.com/forum/155/thread348717.html

    https://geoexpat.com/forum/155/thread344712.html

    https://geoexpat.com/forum/155/thread348001.html

    https://geoexpat.com/forum/155/thread344778.html

    https://geoexpat.com/forum/155/thread346788.html

    Also generally look through the banking and finance forum topics here.

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by MidnightBaker:
    I want to approach it more from a point of view of “if this is the kind of (potentially modest) life I’m seeking, with some key life decisions along the way, what kind of income trajectory would I need in order to live within this (including some contingency)”.
    You might find this interesting:

    https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013...one-blog-post/

    Also make friends with a spreadsheet and start making projections. Naturally many things (stock growth rate, inflation etc.) are hard to predict but just put in some reasonable numbers. I usually take 50 year averages as a starting point. If there's some assumption you're particularly concerned about e.g. stock growth rates you can vary that parameter and see how it impacts your projections.

    You may like this tool also (note that due to a bug you need to manually set the retirement year to 2018 or the statistics wont show up):

    Crowdsourced Financial Independence and Early Retirement Simulator/Calculator

  7. #7

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    I recommend reading Andrew Hallam's book "Millionaire Expat". It is not the only book to read but an easy place to start. The third print run is about to come out.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&...d-328342526337