Next in the series: Get Started Series 3: How it all fits together
Transcript
This transcript was converted to text by AI
Hi, I'm Cam, one of the founders of Canwi. In this video I'm going to give you a quick orientation — where things live, how the app's structured, and why it's set up the way it is.
Home
When you log in or finish onboarding, you'll land on Home. This is your dashboard — it'll give you a quick read on where things stand across your entire picture in Canwi. So your current net worth, as well as your projected wealth and how that's tracking over the course of the decades in your plan, your asset allocation, and your goals. Depending on your goals, you'll see a number of different charts underneath that. This is really a summary view, and we'll get into the detail behind all of this as we go on.
Scenarios
Next is Scenarios. In the left-hand side menu, click down to Scenarios. This is where you create, manage, and compare different versions of your financial plan.
You can have up to 10 scenarios at a time — for instance, a baseline, a "retire at 55" version, a "buy a cheaper house" version, and so on. You can also select up to three of those at a time and compare how they play out with different decisions in between those plans. You can see how that plays out across your net worth, assets, debts, cash flow, as well as some key metrics. We'll cover scenarios in more depth in their own video, but it's worth knowing they're here right from the start.
Today's dollars vs. actual dollars
Before we go any further, I want to call out the selector at the top. My current scenario is called "New Scenario," but next to it you'll see a selector for today's dollars versus actual dollars. This is super important because it affects absolutely everything you see in Canwi, and it's worth understanding what it means.
Think of it like this: a coffee costs $5 today, and in actual dollars, in 2040, because of inflation, that might cost $8. But in today's dollars, it stays at $5, because we're reflecting that price back into money that you have a feel for — how much things cost today.
The same thing applies to lots of different things. For example, in Canwi we grow wages by default at 3.7% per year. In future dollars (actual dollars), it's growing at 3.7% per year. In today's dollars, that growth gets adjusted down because we assume, by default, that inflation will be 2.5% per year. Both of those — 2.5% and 3.7% — are government assumptions, but it will still look like it's growing, just at a lower rate in real terms, in today's dollars.
For most people, I think today's dollars is probably the more useful view, because it lets you think more clearly about whether different decisions are improving your finances, and by how much, in terms you can actually understand today. But future/actual dollars will show you more literally what your bank account will show, and in some contexts it can be easier to read and understand the maths when you look at things in actual dollars.
You can switch between them at any point — just toggle, and it'll adjust the output. Jump over to the Plan screen and you can see that: if I flick between the two, you'll see the projection jump up and down. You'll see that on any of these screens.
You can also update the underlying assumptions — that 3.7% wage growth and 2.5% CPI are both editable in Scenario Settings, on the left.
Plan vs. Track
There are two main modes: Plan and Track — two different things.
Plan is basically your starting point and about your future. This is where you enter where you are today — your income, assets, and debts — and then map out any financial decisions you're planning to make.
Track is where you record your actual progress against that plan over time. As your life unfolds, you log where you are and how reality is tracking against what you originally mapped out.
Canwi isn't a budgeting tool — you're setting a plan, and then measuring your life against it.
Sections under Plan
People — who's in your plan, as well as your key life milestones, like your preservation age. Depending on what life milestones we have for you coming up, it might show things like buying a first home, or when your kids turn 21, for example.
Income, expenses and money flows (skipping ahead of cashflow and balance sheet for a moment):
Income — where you add your employment income as well as other income. Some of this isn't editable directly — government benefits, for example, are calculated, and you'll see a read-only version telling you what's been calculated, like family tax benefits. Income from assets is editable on the Assets screen (e.g. setting a yield on stocks or a rental yield), and you'll see it reflected here. On the right, it's factored into the charts, and you can also see your taxable income over time and your effective tax rate — we use a marginal tax rate system, which is turned into your total income, total income tax, and effective tax rate.
Expenses — your living expenses, expenses for your assets, and debt repayments will all show up here.
Money flows — this is where you configure what happens to surplus cash (when income is greater than expenses) and shortfalls (when expenses are greater than income). You can set assumptions around both here.
Then you've got your home, any investment properties, assets like crypto and stocks, and debts. Each of these has its own projection showing how that individual item plays out over the course of your plan.
The three screens you'll use most
Summary — basically your entire plan on a page. There are a few different views: a breakdown of your wealth, your net wealth, cash flow, savings, and an income breakdown. You can adjust this, and drag the brush to zoom around within the plan. You can also filter things on and off — for example, if you don't want to include your investment property or your superannuation in the wealth breakdown.
Plan Builder — the main place we expect people to do their planning. There are a few different views: cashflow-focused, wealth-focused (which collapses things a bit so you can see more years and the impact of decisions on your long-term picture), and cashflow-and-savings. Or you can build a custom view — controlling column width, and for some chart metrics, whether you see it as a bar chart, line chart, etc. Lots of options. The presets (cashflow, wealth, cashflow and savings) work perfectly well too.
Plan Tables — for the more detail-oriented (if you're using Canwi, that's probably you). This gives you a year-by-year, Excel-style tabular breakdown of your plan — all incomes itemised, for example an income of $90,000 shown alongside the PAYG tax withheld, all broken down granularly in a familiar spreadsheet-style view. Again, you can toggle today's dollars vs. actual dollars here. You can also click on any year — on this and a number of the other charts — to bring up the yearly financial breakdown, giving you even more granular detail on the calculations, deductions, etc.
Track
Finally, there's Track. After you've built out a plan and want to track how you're going against it, this is where you record checkpoints — monthly or quarterly, say — logging actuals as your life plays out.
That's your orientation. In the next video, we're going to go a level deeper into how your income, expenses, assets, and debts feed the projection, and what to watch out for when setting a baseline.
Thanks for watching!