Welcome Guide
What is Kashkoo?
- A tool to see how your choices impact your financial life over decades.
- Free
- Takes only minutes to get answers
- Fully automated and considers:
- Income and Expenses
- Housing: Rent vs Own
- Taxes and Inflation
- Investments and 401k
Kashkoo is a place to explore, think, and find out how your life is likely to turn out
from the choices you make today.
Answer questions like:
Answer questions like:
- How much should I be saving?
- How much better is investing in a 401k than a traditional account?
- Should I own or rent?
- When can I retire? How much do I need to retire today, based on my current
- lifestyle, and my future obligations?
- Should I move to Florida like everyone else?
Getting Started
1. Adding your age
Start by clicking on the Age at the top, and entering your age. You don’t need to register, but if you do, you will be able to save all of your work, as well as limitless number of Scenarios (Workspaces) that you may want to compare.
2. Adding your income
Next, click “Income” on the left side of the screen (or the top-left for Mobile). You might enter “Job” and “$50,000 until age 65, and then another entry for Social Security starting at age 65.
3. Add the rest of your finances
From there just work your way down in a similar fashion starting with Housing, then Expenses, etc.
Tips & Definitions
Forecast
This brings it all together!! Your goal is to have enough Liquid Assets (money to pay for expenses) to make it through retirement, and enough Net Worth for emergencies or to leave to your children. To understand the difference, you may have a valuable home (Net Worth), but no Liquid Assets (cash or easily sold investments such as stocks & bonds) to pay for groceries.
Income
Include all of your incomes, including Social Security. You will probably
earn more over time as your career progresses. Click Yes on “Does this Income
Grow over time”, and then enter a final income. For example, you make $50,000
today, but expect you will make $100,000 when you retire at 65.
Enter all these numbers in Today’s Dollars. (see below for explanation of “Today’s Dollars)
Housing
Whether you own or rent, this is where you enter your details on current and future homes. Perhaps you rent now, and you plan to buy in 5 years with the help of Kashkoo. Perhaps you plan to sell your McMansion when the kids go to college, and downsize to a smaller home. The Housing tab also helps you decide between two different homes, perhaps one big, one small, or renting vs owning. Perhaps one is in a high tax state, while the other is in a low one.
Expenses
Rather than a large list, simply enter the big ones: living Costs, college
tuition, etc as an annual number.
Don’t include any Housing costs here!!
Debt
Enter any other debts you have such as Student Loans, Credit Cards, Auto
Loans.
Don’t enter any mortgages as that’s handled in Housing!!
Investments
You simply need to enter a starting value for Cash, Stocks/Bonds, and 401k. From there the system will automatically rebalance your portfolio annually, invest more or sell investments based on your savings, pay the appropriate taxes. The portfolio makeup will change with age, favoring stocks when you’re young to bonds when you’re older. You can specify whether you want to be more aggressive or conservative in that mix.
Today’s vs Future Dollar’s:
It’s best to show this by example. On the forecast tab, you can see your income over the next decades. If you have a $50,000 steady income, year after year, and you click “Yes” on the Today’s Dollars toggle at the top of the table, you will see an income of $50,000 in each year all the way down. If you select “No”, i.e. future dollars, then that $50,000 will show a higher and higher number as you go down the page, as your income will be adjusted for inflation. This switch has no impact on the internal calculations, only on how you see the result.
