Will Your Clients Accept a 50/50
Chance of Meeting
Their Financial Objectives?
In the world of finance, dollars do not know whether they are 'personal'
or 'corporate' in nature. Yet today they are treated differently in the
different environments. While personal financial planners have created
financial forecasts for their clients, corporate financial planners have
begun using Crystal Ball, an add-in to popular spreadsheet programs, to
go an important step further, and determine the probability that their
forecasts will be accurate in the future. They input their assumptions,
and then they determine how variable they expect the assumptions to be.
The program then looks at various outcomes based on randomly selected
figures for the variables within the parameters defined by the planner.
Depending on how close a look you want to take, it may offer a thousand
or ten thousand different possible outcomes, with an analysis of the probability
of achieving each one. No, it doesn't give you a clear look at the future,
but it does help you define the possibilities and make more intelligent
choices.
This technology is beginning to enter the personal financial planning world,
and will become an increasingly important tool in client service and the
communication of risk and forecast uncertainty. The lead is being taken
by those forward-thinking, technologically-adept planners who have a clientele
who can appreciate sophisticated financial planning.
This small revolution in financial services technology will offer a number
of benefits to both planner and client. Any good MBA can crunch cash flows
to calculate estimated returns on investment projects or the most efficient
prices of securities. Similarly, any good CFP can use software models to
determine how much their clients need to save for a comfortable retirement.
What has been missing is a way to define the likelihood of achieving an
estimated return. The normal spreadsheet model will use the most likely
assumptions, which will tend to have equal variability up and down. That,
of course, means that there will be roughly a 50% chance that reality will
fall short of the assumptions. Yes, you can develop more conservative assumptions
and raise the odds a bit. But with Crystal Ball, you can define for your
clients what those odds will be. Do you want to be 50% sure of meeting your
requirements or 75%? With your help, your clients can determine the probability
of achieving their financial objectives for themselves.
This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of risk. If your clients
desire 90% confidence in achieving a given level of income at retirement,
then they must make greater contributions to their retirement portfolio
than the normal spreadsheet model would recommend. This is an excellent
opportunity to encourage clients to invest more of their monthly cash flow.
Suppose, for example, you have a client who is presently investing $250/month,
and expects to do so for 360 months. If the markets cooperate and deliver
an average annual return of 10%, the client would expect to have $565,000
in the portfolio at the end of the thirty-year investment period. Unfortunately,
the investment amount, the length of the investment, and the investment
return are all assumptions which may or may not hold up as future becomes
the present. Using Crystal Ball, a planner could vary the assumptions by
a 10% standard deviation on a normal distribution - something that could
be easily accomplished using the default setting in Crystal Ball's wizard-like
assumption definition menu. In this simplified example, the investment amount
would vary between $175-$325. The investment period would vary from 252
to 468 months, and the average annual return would most likely fall in the
7% to 13% range.
Running 1,000 trials with these varying assumptions, we discover that the
expected value of this investment is $609,000 - not $565,000. We also learn
from reading the forecast that 95% of all the possible outcomes are greater
than $294,000. Therefore, we can only guarantee the client $294,000 - even
thought we expect the nest egg to be $609,000.
Crystal Ball graphically shows you the tradeoff bargain investment and a
range of possible returns. With Crystal Ball analysis you can can show your
clients the benefit of investing more on a monthly basis. The client is
better-informed and is better able to make a decision on how much to invest.
You can also help the client better understand the various components of
return. We all know about the miracle of compounding. But for a given investor,
which is more important, the length of time to compound on the rate. With
Crystal Ball's sensitivity feature, you can instantly tell how much each
variable contributes to the results of the overall return. In our example,
the time to retirement is driving the model. This underscores the idea of
how important it is to start saving early.
With Crystal Ball, you can handle dozens of assumptions simultaneously.
And you can establish correlation coefficients among variables. In our example,
we could assume that as the average annual rate of return increases, the
length of time to retirement decreases. This implies that as one sees his
nest egg growing faster than anticipated, he may retire earlier. With Crystal
Ball's easy-to-use menus, correlation between variables can be established
with just a click of the mouse. After you pick your coefficient, Crystal
Ball draws the relationship between the variables so you can see the relationship
you have just defined.
For many of today's planning practices, this will seem like revolutionary
and complicated technology. However, as clients become more sophisticated
about their financial affairs, the ability to model the future and offer
defined probabilities of outcomes will help planners differentiate their
services from those offered by magazine or through the Internet. It is a
relatively simple, relatively inexpensive value-added which, in the future,
will help planners more successfully plan for their clients' future, and
more successfully communicate the key issues involved.
Forecast: Portfolio Value at Retirement
Summary:
Certainty level is 95.40%
Certainty Range is from $294,000.00 to + infinity
Dollars Display Range is from $0.00 to $1,400,000.00
Entire Range is from $165,101.70 to $3,154,235,89
After 1,000 Trials, the Std. Error of the Mean is $8,299.24
| Statistics |
Value |
| Trials |
1000 |
| Mean |
$609,327.19 |
| Median (approx.) |
$554,353.40 |
| Mode (approx.) |
$464,015.12 |
| Standard Deviation |
$262,445.09 |
| Variance |
######### |
| Skewness |
1.90 |
| Kurtosis |
12.95 |
| Coeff. of Variability |
0.43 |
| Range Minimum |
$161,101.70 |
| Range Maximum |
$9,154,253.89 |
| Range Width |
$2,989,134.19 |
| Mean Std. Error |
$8,299.24 |
|