FutureBudget

FutureBudget helps you plan and forecast your financial future by flexibly evaluating longer term budgeting and/or investing scenarios. FutureBudget will help you gain insights into and critically think about your finances, while helping you learn about the time-value of money, keeping up with inflation, positive cash flow, and other important concepts.

To work with FutureBudget, you input a list of current and future expected incomes, expenses, assets, loans, accounts, and taxes. These inputs are the essential "building blocks" for budgeting, giving you flexibility in how you use FutureBudget. Moreover, each input itself is quite flexible, with numerous parameters supporting longer term, detailed budgeting; for example:

• Incomes and expenses - keep amount fixed or vary it over time, occur once or repeatedly, increase with expected inflation or exceed/lag inflation.
• Accounts (investment or savings) - yearly return percentage (variable over time), regular contributions, deferred withdrawals, dividends, withdrawal order versus other accounts.
• Loans - fixed or adjustable interest rate, duration, amount borrowed, down payment, extra payments, deferred payments, early payoff.
• Assets - appreciation and/or depreciation, purchase price, purchase and sale date.

Based upon these inputs, FutureBudget generates a detailed forecast showing how your assumptions play out over time and with expected inflation. For example, the forecast includes both plotted and tabular results for expected net worth, cash flow, and total outstanding debt.

Many financial planning or budgeting apps are based on a fixed set of "canned" inputs. Other apps only work with a single type of input, such as loans. However, FutureBudget is more general purpose and flexible; it lets you dig deeper and provide as many different inputs as needed, and tailor these inputs to your unique assumptions. FutureBudget can then generate a forecast which is more customized and complete. For example, given the appropriate inputs, FutureBudget has the flexibility to evaluate the following:

• Beyond just the loan payments, the total cost of ownership for a new car, including depreciation, tax and license fees, insurance and gasoline.
• Lower expected investment returns after retirement.
• Weddings or other large, one time incomes or expenses.
• Certain expenses, such as college or health insurance, whose amounts may grow faster than inflation.
• Expenses which decrease after retirement or when the kids move out.
• Salary increases which either keep up with inflation or do not.

FutureBudget is not intended to replace financial apps providing day-by-day tracking of spending, links with your bank accounts, etc. However, with its flexibility and emphasis on detailed budgeting assumptions and forecasts, FutureBudget should be an excellent addition to your financial toolbox and a complement to other financial apps.

Some useful features include:

• Multiple budgets - ideal for learning the app with a "sandbox budget", evaluating a specific financial event in a stand-alone "mini budget", or helping others with budgeting.
• Multiple scenarios - make changes to input values separately from the main/baseline scenario.
• "What if" views to review and change related input parameters together.
• Variable values - increase or decrease values over time, such as investment returns, loan interest rates, or expense amounts (for example, lower the expected rate of investment return after retirement).
• Milestone dates for financial events like retirement. Multiple inputs can reference the same milestone date.
• Passcode to limit who can open the app.

For more information and examples, be sure to visit the app's web site.

更新履歴
• Fix a bug related to the saving of budget information.
• Improve the performance of forecast results generation.
• Fix a bug related to setting inputs' dates in alternate scenarios (e.g., expense stop dates).
• More frequently save budget information.
• Update documentation of third party software libraries.