Goals
Goals are trackable expenses in Voyant. You can set pre-retirement, retirement, education and milestones goals and your client can see whether they can meet these lifestyle objectives.
A retirement goal, for example, is a good way to demonstrate to clients the likelihood of them meeting their income requirement in retirement.
What is the Difference Between a Goal and an Expense?
A key feature of Voyant is the ability to differentiate between expenses and goals. A goal is a trackable expense, designed to demonstrate visually whether you are on track to achieve your goal. Goals are typically used to highlight standout, often aspirational expenditures – things that may require special planning, such as additional savings – whereas expenses are used to account for one’s regular planned expenditures.
No firm rules govern what should be classified as either a goal or an expense or whether these should be categorized as essentials (basics), leisure spending, luxuries, or milestones. This is up to you and how your client thinks of these expenditures. The decision as to what to model as a goal should be driven by the conversation you have with your client when establishing what is key to them.
The most important distinction between expenses and goals is that goals offer unique features in the software, which are intended to help spotlight them during presentations, whereas expenses are at work mostly in the background as the software calculates the future cashflow. Consider the following special features as you choose what is a goal and what is an expense in your client cases.
Entering a Goal
From the dashboard click the + sign in the bottom right corner then select Goals.
Selecting Goals will open a window that will give you a selection of different types of goals you can enter in the plan. For this example I will be using the milestone goal which is defined as a one time expense.
Once opened you can begin entering the basic information for the Goal. In this example our clients would like to plan for a European Vacation expected cost is $10,000, and we will set this as a luxury goal.
Next you will go to the Timing screen and create or select an event on the Timeline that will correlate to this Goal.
Either select an existing event like "retirement" or double click on the timeline in the year you would like to add the event. Here, I've double clicked on the year my client turns 55, entered the event name as "European vacation" selected the travel icon (airplane) and clicked "set as start event".
Click Done in the top right corner to save.
Once you've clicked "Done" you will be taken back to the dashboard where you are able to check on the status of your clients goal.
From the dashboard you can see that the software is predicting that based on this clients current, income and savings they are expected to be able to meet this goal.