LifeMap
Project income, investments, debt and major life decisions across decades, and see how one choice today reshapes your net worth and financial health.
Simulates income, investments, debt and the major life decisions across decades, so you can see how much one choice today moves your net worth at 60.
How to use it
- Set your starting position — age, income, career field and what you have now.
- Pick the life goals that are genuinely yours; each one has a cost and a timing the simulation respects.
- Read the curve and the financial-health score together, not the final number alone.
- Change one input, re-run, and compare. The difference between two runs is the output worth trusting.
How it is calculated
Income grows from your starting salary at a rate set by career field, with milestone stages across the working life.
Investable surplus compounds at the modelled return, while debts amortise, and each life decision applies its cost at the age you place it.
A financial-health score is derived at each stage from the resulting position, so the curve is readable as more than a single balance.
A worked example
Reading the difference between two runs, not either one
- Starting age
- 30
- Run A
- Baseline — current income, current savings rate
- Run B
- Identical, except each raise is split 50/50 from age 30
- What to compare
- The gap between the two curves at 60
- What not to compare
- Either final number against a real-world expectation
The output worth trusting is the difference, because both runs share every assumption. One curve read alone is a forty-year forecast, which nothing can produce honestly; two curves read against each other isolate the single decision you changed.
Common mistakes
- Reading the final number as a prediction. It is one path under stated assumptions — its value is comparative.
- Changing several inputs between runs, which makes the difference uninterpretable. Change one thing at a time.
- Selecting every life goal on offer. The simulation respects each cost and date, and a scenario nobody intends to live tells you nothing.
- Ignoring the financial-health score in favour of the balance. A high balance reached through a fragile position is not the same outcome.
What it assumes
- A forty-year projection is not a forecast and is not offered as one. Its value is comparative — scenario against scenario.
- It cannot model a career break, a health event, a market crash at the wrong moment, or an inheritance. Real lives contain all four.
- Career growth multipliers are modelled averages for a field. Individual outcomes inside any field vary far more than the gap between fields.
Frequently asked questions
What does LifeMap actually simulate?
A whole financial life: income growth by career track, investments, debt, and the major decisions — home, marriage, children, further study, a business — laid out across decades, with the resulting net worth and financial-health score at each stage.
How accurate is a forty-year projection?
As a forecast, not accurate at all, and it is not offered as one. Its value is comparative: the difference between two scenarios is far more robust than either absolute number, so use it to see how much one decision moves the curve rather than to predict a balance in 2066.
Why does my career field change the projection so much?
Because income growth rate compounds for longer than any other input in the model. Over decades, a difference in the rate at which earnings rise dominates differences in savings rate or return — which is the single most useful thing this simulation shows.