the agnostic investor

Written by Taraje Williams-Murray, CEO of Coroebus Wealth Management

financial planning and investment management simplified

Your Financial Plan Should Move With You 

Most financial plans begin with a snapshot. You assess the fact: earnings, savings, age of retirement, expenses, purchase goals. 

Those inputs go into a model, a few calculations are applied, and you’re handed a “plan” – spend $X, save $Y, invest $Z. 

But what happens next? 

 What happens after the traditional planning experience? The original projection sits there until the next planning meeting. What are you supposed to do in the meantime?

Over the past several months, we’ve been building Pythia around a simple goal: turning your financial plan into actions. By providing ongoing monitoring of your financial data to provide up-to-date and accurate assessments of your goals, Pythia helps you answer why your probabilities of success may change and identify what you can consider doing about it.

At first glance, progress toward a financial goal seems simple. If your goal requires $100,000 and you have $25,000 saved, you might say you’re 25% of the way there.

That is essentially what Pythia’s Progress measurement is intended to communicate: the amount of capital currently on hand for a specified goal relative to the capital associated with that goal.

But there’s an important question hiding inside that calculation:

Which capital actually belongs to the goal?

An investor may have a checking account, IRA, 401(k), brokerage account and other assets. Not every dollar should necessarily be treated as available for every financial objective.

A retirement account, for example, may be relevant to a retirement goal but not to a near-term home purchase. A brokerage account might be intended for one goal, several goals or no particular goal at all.

That’s why we’ve designed Pythia to allow accounts to be connected to specific goals.

Linking an account provides a more current measurement of the capital associated with the goal. If the value of that account changes, Pythia can incorporate the updated information rather than waiting for you to manually update the plan.

It doesn’t make the future more predictable.

That’s an important distinction.

Better data can improve the quality of an analysis in markets, future returns, inflation, spending or any of the other assumptions involved in financial planning.

The Behavioral Problem

Information doesn’t automatically produce action.

Knowing that you’re behind on a goal isn’t the same as knowing what to do next. And knowing what to do next doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it.

That’s where behavioral finance becomes particularly important. Investors make decisions while dealing with uncertainty, competing priorities, market volatility, fear, optimism, inertia and countless other influences.

So our objective with Pythia isn’t simply to calculate probabilities.

We want to explore how changes in those probabilities—and the financial activity behind them—can generate timely, actionable behavioral nudges.

We will start with telling you when your probability of success has changed, but we won’t stop there. We will help you identify the factors that contributed most to the change and offer suggested actions for you to consider and enact.

This analysis moves your financial plan from a snapshot to a moving picture.

How We Get There

We’re connecting Pythia to live data  in order to test the entire chain:

Account activity → Goal progress → Updated analysis → Probability change → Actionable insight

We’re testing whether account values are being interpreted correctly.

We’re testing how linked accounts affect goal progress.

We’re testing whether changes flow correctly into our probabilistic analysis.

And we’re testing whether the information we ultimately present to the investor is understandable and useful.

November 3

We are currently targeting November 3 for the release of Pythia’s beta MVP.

The beta will be the beginning of testing our vision with real users.

Our broader goal is to build a financial planning experience that doesn’t simply tell you where you stood when your plan was created.

We want to build one that can connect the money you actually have with the goals you’re trying to achieve, recognize when something meaningful changes, and help you understand what that change means.

Because your financial life changes.

Your financial plan should move with you.


Pythia is a financial technology service being developed by Coroebus Wealth Management. Progress measurements are based on information provided by the user and/or account information associated with a goal and should not be interpreted as a guarantee that a goal will be achieved. Probabilistic analyses and simulations are hypothetical in nature, depend on assumptions and inputs, and do not guarantee future results. Results may vary over time and with changes in assumptions, market conditions, account activity and other factors. Information presented is for educational and informational purposes.

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