New Pathfinder Release (Kirk)

11 December 2017

Release Summary

New features in this release

Insurance bonds are now part of the websolve (popular request)

Pathfinder can now model new and existing insurance bonds in the websolve. The goals for insurance bonds have a variety of different options, including, but not limited to:

• Savings plan - Let Pathfinder calculate how much you can withdraw, given a specific schedule of deposits.

• Save up for something - Let Pathfinder calculate how much to deposit, given a desired schedule of withdrawals

For more about modelling insurance bonds, see the Insurance bond help page, which has helpful recipes for the the most common modelling requests.

Set the number of years for analysis (popular request)

By default Pathfinder does projections for 20 years, but you now have to option to do the analysis for between 10 and 20 years.

• You can choose the number of years in the 'Analysis years' field at the top of the 'Cash flows and goals' step

• If you want to download a strategy paper:

  • If you've chosen 10 years of analysis, choose a template with 'SinglePageTables-First 10 years only'

  • If you've chosen more than 10 years of analysis, you have two choices for the detailed report tables:

    • Skip years so the tables fit on one page - choose a template with 'SinglePageTables' and then choose a template that includes the number of years for analysis you have chosen.  e.g. if you chose 14 years of analysis, choose 'Years1to7-then11-14-17'

    • Show all years for analysis - the detailed report tables will go across two pages - choose a template with 'All years'

For more, see How to set the number of years for analysis.

Switch off the Age pension estimate

By default, Pathfinder will include an estimate for the Age pension, but you can now choose to exclude an Age pension estimate from the results. This is useful if:

• You would like to see the outcome without the Age Pension

• You know the individuals are not eligible and would like to speed up solve times

For more see How to include or exclude the Government Age Pension.

Speed up solve times

In the past few months, over 95% of cases have solved in under 3 minutes, however for the cases that have taken more than 5 minutes, some of our new features may help. For notes on how to speed up solve times for those tricky cases, see Tips for reducing solve times.

Assumptions are now visible all the time

The assumptions that are used in a scenario, are now visible at the Results > Solve step, without you needing to click solve first.

A few new charts at the compare step

The Compare step has two new charts:

• Total loan balances

• Age Pension

Got more ideas for charts?  Contact us.

Notes for existing users

Insurance bonds

If you would like to run a case with an insurance bond and the case was created before 12 December 2017, then please let us know and we'll upgrade it.  Without the upgrade, you can still get results, but it will be missing some charts.

If you've added Insurance bonds in previous versions of Pathfinder, you may notice the following differences:

• For the 'Type field' we now only allow one type 'Insurance bond' (we've removed Education bonds due to lack of demand)

• The 'Interest rate' field must always be after tax (there is help text on this field to show you how to convert the before 'tax' rate to the after tax rate)

Documents

When downloading strategy documents, you'll notice a longer list of templates - this is to allow for different year ranges for analysis.

New sub-step in the results

At the Results step, the interactive cash flows report has moved to a new sub-step called 'Cash flows & Action items' (it used to be at the end of the 'strategy summary' step).  This makes the report easier to see and reduces scrolling.

Compare charts are now in acutal values

The charts at the Compare step are now displayed in actual values so that they are consistent with the strategy summary step (previously they were in present values).  As a reminder, there is als now a message at the top of the results steps saying that actual values are used.

Did you see our minor release in October?

We did a minor release in October with updates for the new super transfer balance cap and some indexation of threshholds. For more details, see Minor Pathfinder release (Janszoon v2) - copied.