Breakdown of Expenses in Liftime Planner tool

Tom Strange

In the Lifetime Planner the breakdown of income is very clear, but when it comes to Expenses, I'm not sure what is included or how it is derived, e.g. my mortgage is considered since it is a loan, but does this include my escrow for property taxes and insurance? Do I have to include these in the manual or budget expense calculation?

Scooterlam

@Tom Strange
Quicken's Planning>Budget feature is not integrated into Planning>Lifetime planner feature. Although "Budget" is very useful for building your pre and post retirement budgets for manual input to LTP's Living Expenses, asset expenses and special expense assumptions, if you have them.  So.....

OPTION 1:  You can account for your home related in expenses (including escrows) in LTP under Current Homes and Assets assumption. See Image.  Here you can create a home (or select your existing home), tie loans, expenses and home related income to it.  I take this approach as it is very simple to do "what if" scenarios on selling and buying future homes.   That is, when you model a home sale in LTP (Sale Info), the related Loan, Expenses and Incomes stop with the sale.  As such, I only use home related expenses in the dialog shown below.



OPTION 2:   Add your home expenses (lump sum) as part of your overall Living Expense assumption.   

OPTION 3:   Add your home expenses (line item) as part of a Special Expense assumption.

Personally, Option 1 has the most utility,  YMMV.  For more information on the dialogs above, click on the blue ? icon.

More about using the various expense assumption in LTP here:  https://help.quicken.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3216778