goalgamiPro January Release

Terminology Changes in goalgamiPro

As part of our ongoing effort to make goalgamiPro the most useful tool to help your clients achieve their lifetime goals, we have made some terminology changes.  We made these changes because we feel they add some clarity to Financial Advisors using the application, as well as for clients reviewing the report.  Below are some of the changes made, and our rationale behind some of the changes.

• “Future Savings” and “Future Benefits” -> “Anticipated Savings” and “Anticipated Benefits” 
  • Many clients were getting confused by the appearance of the word ‘Future’ on a report that looked at the Present Value of anticipated cash flows. 

• “Age of Death -> “End of Life”

  • There is really no good way to display the date of expected death, but we felt the “End of Life” was a better title to display to a client
• “COLA” -> “Inflation”
• We received a fair amount of feedback that we should use the more common term of Inflation over COLA.
• We have made other smaller changes that - if we have done it right - will go unnoticed by you because they are more intuitive or add clarity
  
  

 Updates to Entering Anticipated Savings / Benefits and Goals

Many of you have asked for us to make the Anticipated Savings and Benefits easier to enter.  Specifically, you wanted Anticipated Savings / Benefits and Goals to tie the start and end dates to events- namely Retirement or End of Life.   This makes entering resources or goals much more flexible. 

For example: When setting up a retirement contribution, at “Start Date” you select “Already Saving” to indicate that savings starts now.  Then at “End Date”, you can either enter the date or set the date to coincide with the retirement of one of the principals.

Figure 1: Setting Anticipated Savings

In setting an Anticipated Benefit, much the same process is followed but you will more than likely want to begin the Benefit at the Retirement of one principal and end at End of Life.

Figure 2: Setting up an Anticipated Benefit

A few nuances are important to understand. If you are using the Actuarial method to determine the End of Life (this option is set in “Plan Details”), you may see “ongoing” as the end date.  This is being displayed because these end dates are based on an actuarial table of life expectancy with the amounts reduced by the probability of survival in each year.  We display “ongoing” because any set date would be inaccurate.  Also, make sure that your “Benefit Recipient” matches with the person used in the “End Date” when entering Anticipated Benefits when using the Actuarial method. We use the “Benefit Recipients” end of life, so it is important not to have this conflict.

Bug Fixes

Several important bugs are being resolved in this release.

• We can now accept special characters (&,%, etc) in the integration with Redtail.  This was previously causing an error.
• We resolved an issue that caused the notes to, after a combination of actions, disappear.
• Resolved Chrome issue where strange character appeared in the footnotes of the balance sheet.
• “Copy” now copies the frequency for Retirement goals
• Enable Collaboration button now working when users name has an apostrophe