Planned

:speech_balloon:

Branching "plan" model with variables shared with parent plan

If we look at the current “plan” system, each plan is independent from other ones, aside from if you “clone” a plan - that plan is equal to the other one at that very specific time only. Let’s call this a “cloning” model.

In a “branching” model, you could have a “parent” plan that provides a common base, and “child” plan that would stay in sync with the parent for all the variables, except those that have been overriden by the child.

The main use case for this would be to maintain a “main” plan (the current strategy our family is following) continuously, while having some contingency plans ready and continuously in sync with our current plan (aside from the overriden variables).

Right now, with the “cloning” model, maintaining N alternative plans requires us to be diligent in copying all the same values across all the plans. This is very prone to error.

109 votes

Tagged as Suggestion

Suggested 23 April 2022 by user Antoine Grondin

Moved into Planned 03 March

  • Sign in to comment and vote. Sign in by email

  • 23 April 2022 Antoine Grondin suggested this task

  • 23 April 2022 Kyle Nolan approved this task

  • avatar
    Andy Crouch

    Yes yes! This is one of the best features of Maxifi Planner.

    24 July 2023
  • avatar
    AB BA

    Agreed. I find it confusing that my Starting Conditions are specified per plan. Conceptually, I think of my Starting Conditions as being my financial reality as of whenever I set up my PL account (ie. a month or two ago for me), which doesn’t change, no matter what I happen to plan/model for my future. ie. I’d love for my Starting Conditions to be plan-agnostic.

    I understand that currently, a workaround is to change to the “plan that always starts today” mode, but it’s very important to me to be able to plan per calendar-year.

    06 September 2023
  • avatar
    AB BA

    Similarly, I’d love to have my “State/Provincial” taxes that I set up to be set at the ‘parent’ level, instead of having to set and update them on each individual plan.

    06 September 2023
  • avatar
    Evan Goldenberg

    This would be very powerful. I want to use the software to compare different scenarios. For example, given a set of income assumptions, a plan where I purchase a property vs a plan where I rent. I’d like to have a variety of plans, but have then all update automatically when I get a raise at work, for example

    07 January
  • avatar
    Brendan

    It would be great if a “save current settings to branch” option was available, such that you didn’t need to manually specify the differences between the trunk and the branch. PL would maintain a live change list, and a new branch could be saved at any point (with an explanatory title).

    07 January

  • 03 March Kyle Nolan moved this task into Planned

  • avatar
    Casey

    This would definitely be a game-changer. Consider me a huge fan of this one.

    03 March
  • avatar
    Randy

    This seems like a good idea but it would be good to hear how the UI would be managed. I’m sure Kyle has some ideas and maybe it’s best to prototype them and see what happens.

    04 March
  • avatar
    Bryce Feigum

    This would be a HUGE help to me. I like having multiple plans to try to different ideas and having to update the income, expenses, etc to all the plans is a big hassle.

    04 March
  • avatar
    R0CKnU

    Yes! This will save a lot of grunt work

    07 March
  • avatar
    BRIAN MOORE

    Is this planned for implementation in the next couple of months or so? I have over a dozen clones and if it’s going to be a while, I’ll go through each one and figure out the differences of those variables / inputs that should be the same. It seems there were frequent updates for a while but the last one was 1.5 months ago. Not complaining, this is great. Just wondering, ballpark estimate on implementation. Thanks.

    05 July