Matt

Having hit our 50s and with the arrival of our first grandchild, we decided it was about time to get serious about retirement planning. I spent months researching the rules around superannuation (concessional and non-concessional) and CGT, investment options and building out a complex spreadsheet to pull it all together.

While researching investment options, I came across a post from Cameron talking about Canwi and decided to give it a go. That complex spreadsheet I had poured hundreds of hours into? I reproduced it in Canwi in a couple of hours. We have three investment properties and privately held shares, so our situation is not overly complicated, but also not simple.

Just as we were getting confident with our plans, the Australian government made some dramatic changes to CGT. To put it mildly, we were horrified, thinking it meant we wouldn't be able to retire early.

I jumped back into Canwi and modelled about a dozen options. To my surprise, I confirmed we would still be okay, but it dramatically altered our previously planned approach. We originally planned to hold all the assets until we retired and sell them when we were no longer working to minimise tax, but the new minimum 30% tax fundamentally broke that idea. Instead, the models showed we were better off accelerating the sale, paying off the mortgages and contributing the balance to non-concessional super.

This was a radical change, so I asked our accountant to review it (another wonderful feature of Canwi is being able to provide your accountant a direct link to your model). They reviewed the plan and were surprised at how well Canwi captured and implemented all the complex rules around super, CGT, etc. The fact that Canwi had the proposed legislative changes integrated into the model within a couple of weeks was amazing.

Honestly, my initial intention was simply to use it to cross-check my spreadsheet, and at that point, I thought I was done. The "aha" moment was realising the ability to very, very quickly build out multiple options to compare and contrast them. Then, the more time I spent in the tool, the more I realised how much more it has to offer, like budgeting, tracking actuals, etc. For me, that changed it from a one-off calculator to a platform I will use to manage our ongoing finances and knowing we can use it to deal with any other events as the come along. The bottom line, it gave us the confidence to know we can retire early.

Firstly I want to say a huge thanks to the team. The rate of development, the support on Discord, the videos, the regular support calls... it's just amazing, and way beyond my expectations.

I do have a couple of suggestions! :-) I would love to have an ability to automatically sweep savings into super (yes, I know it's complex), which would be particularly useful when approaching the retirement phase in the plan. The other thing would be the ability to have investment buckets within super and run Monte Carlo simulations to help provide confidence in the investment strategy. Again, it's not hard to run that externally and bring the data back in, but having it fully integrated would be awesome!