Financial planning
A plan is a set of dated commitments, not a document. This is the work of deciding what has to be true, and when.
What a plan actually is
A set of dated commitments. School fees starting in a particular year. A property purchase. A business sale you may or may not control the timing of. Retirement, which for a business owner is rarely a date and usually a transition.
The work is deciding what has to be true for those to happen, and then checking, periodically, whether it still is.
What planning here does not do
It does not model Tanzanian income tax. The planning software available for this work is built around United States tax rules, and running a Tanzanian household through it means switching the US assumptions off rather than substituting local ones.
Every figure you see in a plan is therefore pre-tax. That is a real limitation, it is stated here rather than discovered later, and it is factored into how the numbers are discussed.
- Tax treatment
- Plans are modelled pre-tax. US federal, state and Social Security assumptions are switched off; no Tanzanian tax regime is substituted, because the software has none.
- Account linking
- No Tanzanian bank can be linked automatically — no local bank is supported by the aggregation provider. Balances are entered and maintained by hand, which also means they are as current as the last time they were updated.
- Projections
- Plan projections are scenario arithmetic on assumptions you can see and change. They are not forecasts and not a statement about what markets will do.