Minor Pathfinder release (technical update for December quarter 2017)

Monday 23 April 2018

Release Summary

Optimo Financial has done a minor release to Optimo Pathfinder, and updated the historical values for CPI and AWOTE for the December quarter 2017, which were announced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on 24 April 2018. These values are used in Pathfinder to calculate the indexation of various legislated thresholds and the new release assumes that some thresholds will increase at a slower rate than the previous version does. For example, after the update, the transfer balance cap is projected to increase from $1.7m to $1.8m in 2022/23, whereas before the update, this increase was projected to occur one year earlier.

We believe the majority of cases will be unaffected by this change or only have minor changes, particularly in the first few years of the results. Cases that are most likely to change under the new assumptions are ones which get close to the thresholds in the medium-to-long term (e.g. super transfer balance cap, super contributions caps).

What does this mean for your active cases?

In light of this update, you may wish revisit your active cases:

If you created a case, or most recently solved all its scenarios, after the release time of 4pm on Monday 23rd April, then the new values will be applied consistently in your case and you don't need to do anything further.
If you are continuing work on a case created before the release time that also has multiple scenarios, check if any results were created before the release time. If so, re-solve these scenarios, so that all scenarios are using the same underlying assumptions.
If you have completed a case before the update, it is up to your discretion whether to generate new results with the new assumptions. You can copy the scenario and solve it with the new assumptions to see if they are different (see below)

How to check when your results were created and how to re-solve a scenario to get results with the new technical details

To check when your results were created (if they were created before 4pm on Monday 23rd April, they were created with the previous version):

https://help.optimopathfinder.com.au/userdocs/web/how-to-check-when-your-results-were-created

If you want to resolve your case:

If you would like to keep a copy of the previous results for reference, make a copy of the scenario (for more, see How to make another scenario for comparison)
Solve the scenario, the results will use the latest version (for more see How to solve a scenario to get results)
If you are comparing the old and new results, you can see an overview at the ‘Compare’ step, and for more detail, you can compare the action items in the earlier years.