Projections

What this screen is for

Projections answers one question: if this household keeps doing what the fact-find says they do, and the assumptions in the side panel hold, what does each year look like? The answer is a year-by-year table of income, tax, expenses, surplus and balances, a chart, and a set of warnings about anything the model had to guess, refuse or clamp. It is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same figures, so you can change one thing and know that any movement in the result came from that change.

The page has four tabs, and the General tab is the household model and the one that feeds the advice document, the client portal and the Chart Room. The other three (Super Accumulation, ABP Drawdown, Investment Growth) are single-purpose calculators that run entirely in your browser from the numbers you type. They share nothing with the General tab and nothing with the fact-find.

Most of this guide is about the General tab. The three calculators are covered at the end.

Starting a workspace

Pick a source in the strip at the top and press Prefill, or choose Start fresh and enter everything by hand. Prefill reads each client in the household and creates one actor per person, plus a joint actor if the household holds anything jointly.

What prefill pulls from the fact-find, per person:

Field	Source
Current age	Date of birth
Retirement age	The stated retirement age on the client’s active scenario, if one is recorded. Blank otherwise.
Gross salary	Salary income rows
Other income	All other income rows, summed
Living expenses	The expense rows attributed to this person. When a joint actor exists, household living costs go to the joint actor instead.
Super balance	Super account rows
Investments, property, cash	Asset rows this person owns, at their ownership share
Debts and rates	Liability rows this person owns, split into non-deductible and deductible, at the highest rate in each group

Three things prefill does not do. It does not create any movements; you add those yourself. It sets the horizon to thirty years from the current calendar year. And it writes a life expectancy of 90 for every person, because nothing in the fact-find records one.

Prefill also records which fact-find values it read, so that later the page can tell you when they have moved. That is the “SSOT (the fact-find, Aether’s one store of client facts) data has changed” banner, covered under Refresh below.

What the model assumes when you leave a field blank

Every number the engine uses has a value even when you have not typed one. The ones that most often surprise a first-week reader are listed here. Each can be changed per person or per workspace in the input panel.

Assumption	Default	Where it applies
Retirement age	65, and the run warns you it made this up	Salary and SG stop, and any pension starts, from this age
Life expectancy	90	Used to size the default horizon when none is set
Salary growth	3% a year	Also grows “other income” at the same rate
Superannuation guarantee rate	The statutory rate for the current financial year, read from the regulatory pack (the dated set of official rates, caps and thresholds Aether keeps for each financial year)	Employer contributions
Growth return	7% a year	Growth assets inside super
Defensive return	4% a year	Defensive assets inside super
Super growth weighting	70% growth, 30% defensive, per person	Accumulation-phase super
Pension growth weighting	50% growth, 50% defensive, per workspace	Pension-phase super
Super fee drag	0.7% a year	Deducted from the blended super return
Investment return	7% a year per account, or the account’s own rate if you set one	Non-super investments
Investment fee drag	0.5% a year	Deducted from the investment return
Property growth	0% unless you set a rate on the property	Property values are held flat by default
Cash rate	0%	Cash earns nothing unless you say otherwise
Inflation	2.5% a year	Indexes expenses and deflates the “today’s dollars” view
Expense growth	Follows inflation unless you set a separate rate	Living expenses

Two of these deserve a sentence each. The retirement age default of 65 has been measured and it flatters the result: against a true retirement at 60 it overstates final wealth, so the model warns rather than moving the number. And a super account balance is split into taxed and tax-free components from the fact-find; where those component facts are missing or do not add up, the run treats the whole balance as taxed element and says so in the warnings.

Where you have set an investment account’s income return (the “of which assessable income” column in Account returns), that percentage of the opening balance is treated as a taxable distribution each year, on top of the capital return. Left blank, all return is treated as capital and tax is deferred until a sale, which understates tax in every year before one.

How each year is calculated

The engine steps through the horizon one calendar year at a time. Inside each year the order matters, because a later step reads what an earlier one left behind.

1. Events dated this year are applied first. A salary change, a property sale, a lump sum, and so on.
2. Household expenses are split evenly between the individuals. If a joint actor carries the living costs, each person is charged an equal share.
3. Interest on jointly held deductible debt is charged, and split between the people who own it. The split is the ownership recorded against the loan, so a loan held 60/40 gives its owners 60 and 40 per cent of the interest to deduct. It happens before the two steps below, not with the rest of the joint balances at the end, because the spouse-income step subtracts each person’s deductions and the tax step claims them.
4. The Age Pension is worked out from the start-of-year balance sheet, then each spouse’s income is published to the other for the seniors offset test. Both are skipped entirely if marital status is not recorded. The spouse-income figure is net of each person’s deductions, including their share of a joint loan from step 3, with investment losses added back the way the offset’s own rules require.
5. Each person’s year is run: income, contributions, tax, expenses, surplus. A person at or past their retirement age runs the retirement version instead (below).
6. Recurring contributions come out of surplus: any annual non-concessional contribution first, clamped to the remaining cap room, then any recurring investment contribution. A retired person has no surplus, so these are reported as not modelled rather than silently dropped.
7. Movements spend what is left, in the order you have listed them.
8. Whatever surplus remains pays down non-deductible debt, then goes to cash. A deficit is funded the other way: withdrawal movements first, then cash, then investments, then super where the law allows.
9. Interest accrues on the non-deductible debt that remains. Deductible debt accrued earlier: a person’s own inside step 5, and the joint actor’s at step 3, because both are deductions the tax calculation in step 5 needs.
10. The joint actor’s balances grow last, after movements have credited anything to them. Its deductible debt is the exception, charged at step 3 above so that its owners can deduct the interest in step 5.

Within a working person’s year, the arithmetic is:

• Salary is the fact-find figure grown at the salary growth rate from the first projected year.
• Employer super is salary multiplied by the SG rate. It is compulsory and is never clamped, even when it alone exceeds the concessional cap (the run warns in that case).
• Salary sacrifice is clamped twice: to the concessional cap room left after SG (plus any carry-forward room you have granted with an event), and to the salary itself. The excess stays in salary and is taxed at marginal rates. Excess-contribution charges and Division 293 are not modelled.
• Contributions tax comes off both SG and salary sacrifice on the way into the fund, at the pack’s contributions tax rate.
• Accumulation super grows at the blended return (growth weighting times the growth rate, plus the remainder times the defensive rate, less fee drag), then that earning is taxed at the pack’s fund earnings tax rate. Pension-phase super grows at the pension blend with no earnings tax.
• Taxable income is salary less sacrifice, plus other income, plus any assessable capital gain, plus the Age Pension, plus the assessable part of any super income stream payment, less this year’s interest on deductible debt. Tax is the personal liability for that financial year, with the seniors offset applied from Age Pension age. The deduction comes off the income rather than off the tax, so it is worth the person’s own marginal rate; it cannot take taxable income below zero, because the engine models no carry-forward of losses to a later year.
• Net income is salary less sacrifice less tax, plus other income, plus any pension drawdown, plus the Age Pension. Expenses are the person’s own plus their share of household costs, indexed once. Surplus is net income less expenses less any goal outflow dated this year.
• Investments grow at the account return less fee drag. Property grows at its rate if one is set. Lump sums from events land at year end, after growth, so a deposit earns nothing in its first year.

Net wealth in every row is super plus investments plus cash plus property, less both kinds of debt.

Deductible debt

Deductible debt accrues interest every year, at the highest deductible rate on the person’s own liability rows, and that interest is deducted from their taxable income the same year. The interest is added to the balance rather than paid out of cash, the same convention the non-deductible balance uses, so what the columns show is a capitalising loan: net wealth falls by the interest, and cash rises by the tax the deduction saves. One step charges the interest whether the loan sits on a person or on the joint actor.

For a client of Age Pension age the deduction has a second effect, and it runs the other way. The seniors offset tapers on rebate income, which adds net investment losses back, so deducting the interest does not also shrink the figure the offset is shaded on. A share of a jointly held loan behaves the same way: it is deducted from the person’s income and added back into the figure their offset is shaded on. The engine cannot compute the statutory loss, because it does not link a loan to an asset: it treats the deductible interest as the investment deduction and the investment distributions it already credits as the investment income, and adds back whatever is left over. A negatively geared property investor’s loss is not counted at all, because the engine reads no rental income from a property row (below), which understates their rebate income.

A loan the household holds jointly

The joint actor has no income of its own, so it cannot deduct anything. A jointly held investment loan is instead deducted by the people who own it, each taking the share the ownership records give: a loan held 60/40 puts 60 per cent of the interest against one person’s income and 40 per cent against the other’s. A share is subject to the same floor as a person’s own interest: it cannot take their taxable income below zero, because the engine models no carry-forward of losses to a later year. So a member whose income is smaller than their share of the interest loses the excess for good, and nothing in the run reports the amount. Each loan counts in proportion to its balance, so a household holding a small loan evenly and a large one 70/30 gets a split close to 70/30. The interest itself is charged at the highest deductible rate across the joint loans, the same convention a person’s own loans use, so two joint loans at different rates are modelled as one balance at the higher of them.

One half of a geared joint portfolio reaches the members and the other does not. The loan’s interest is deducted by its owners, as above, but income the jointly held investments pay out is credited to nobody and taxed to nobody (see “What the model does not do”), so a household that holds both sees the deduction without the matching income. Where that matters, state the investment income as other income on the person who receives it.

Where the records do not say who owns it, the deduction goes to nobody and the run tells you. That happens when the workspace carries no ownership for the joint holdings at all, and when the loan sits with a company or trust whose ownership share is not recorded. Part of a loan can be unattributed on its own: a loan held by a company the client owns half of gives that person half the interest, and the other half belongs to an owner this model does not tax. In every one of those cases the balance still grows, so the warning names the dollars nobody deducted. Recording the ownership on the liability in the fact-find is what fixes it.

One limit worth knowing before you read the debt columns. Nothing repays deductible debt: surplus pays down non-deductible debt only, so a deductible balance compounds for the whole horizon unless you model repayments yourself as a movement or an event.

Retirement

A person is treated as fully retired in every year where their age is at or past their retirement age. From that year, salary and employer super stop. The retirement year runs differently:

• If the person has no pension or transition-to-retirement balance yet, their whole accumulation balance is moved into a retirement-phase pension, up to the space left under their transfer balance cap. This happens once, automatically.
• Any transition-to-retirement pension converts to a retirement pension at 65 or on full retirement, whichever comes first.
• The pension pays at least the statutory minimum for the person’s age, read from the pack for that financial year. The pack’s schedule is keyed from age 55 up, and below 55 the engine applies no minimum. That floor is the model’s, not preservation age (the pack puts that at 60), and it is why an account-based pension started before 55 (a disability or death-benefit stream) is not modelled here. If you set a payment rate on the commencement event, the higher of the two is drawn.
• The drawdown then rises to cover any gap between expenses (plus goal outflows) and the income already arriving: other income, the Age Pension, and any event income. Because it closes a gap, anything that changes tax or expenses changes the drawdown with it, and two projections differing in one input will not draw the same pension. Cash shortfalls after that are funded from investments, then super.
• Other income keeps growing at the salary growth rate.
• Income stream payments are taxed by component: from age 60 only an untaxed element is assessable.

Where the cash runs out even after super, the year records an unfunded retirement shortfall, and the warnings list shows it.

One refusal to know about: under age 60, the model will not draw a lump sum from accumulation super to cover a deficit, because it does not model lump-sum tax below 60. The shortfall is reported instead.

Movements

A movement spends surplus every year it is active. It has a type (contribution, transfer, repayment or withdrawal), a mode, an amount where the mode needs one, the person whose surplus it draws on, and a destination account.

Mode	What it does
Fixed amount	Moves the amount, or whatever surplus is left if that is less
Fill to cap	Tops the destination up to its cap: for cash, the amount you enter is the balance to fill to; for a debt, the balance owing; for super, the remaining contribution room
Percent of remaining surplus	Takes that percentage of what is left when this movement’s turn comes
All remaining surplus	Takes everything left

The rules that shape what a movement can do:

• Order is the list order. Each movement sees only what the ones above it left, so drag the rows into the priority you intend.
• Only an individual’s surplus can be spent. A movement pointed at the joint actor’s surplus finds an empty pool. A retired person’s surplus pool is zero, because their drawdown is sized to their expenses.
• Destinations are cash, investments, super (concessional), super (non-concessional) and non-deductible debt. A concessional contribution is credited net of contributions tax.
• Capped destinations are clamped, and the remainder stays in surplus. Super contributions are clamped to the person’s remaining cap room for the year (shared with SG, salary sacrifice, recurring contributions and events, so two movements cannot fill the same cap twice). A debt repayment is clamped to the balance owing.
• A withdrawal movement is not a surplus rule. It names a person and a source (cash, investments or super) and takes one of two modes. The source is always one person’s accounts: the projection draws a withdrawal from a person, not from a joint holding or an entity. A fixed withdrawal naming one cannot be saved; an older cover-the-shortfall withdrawal naming one still loads, is not drawn, and the projection’s warnings say so until you re-point it. Cover the shortfall draws what a working year’s deficit needs from that source, before the default cash-then-investments-then-super order. It is not yet read once the person has retired. Fixed amount draws the amount a year from investments or super into the person’s cash (cash itself cannot be the source, since nothing would move), in surplus and deficit years alike, working or retired. Super pays only what the law allows. Once the person has retired, a fixed amount from super sets the year’s pension draw to at least that amount: it counts towards the minimum pension rather than being paid on top, and an amount below the minimum draws the minimum and says so. A fixed withdrawal moves money between the person’s own balances and does not spend it: to spend it, add an expense. If the source holds less than the amount, the projection draws what it can and warns.
• Naming a specific account does not credit that account. The engine works on one blended investment balance and one super balance per person, so a movement into “Ava · Vanguard” when Ava also holds another fund lands in the blend, and the run tells you so.

When a movement cannot do what you asked, the warnings list shows one line per movement per cause for the whole run, marked with the first year it happened. The causes you will see are an empty surplus pool, not enough surplus, a cap already reached, a contribution clamped to cap room, and a repayment clamped to the debt.

Events

An event is something that happens on a date, and thirteen kinds are offered.

Five of them are step changes, which hold from their year onward until an end year you set: salary change, change in living expenses, change in investment strategy, phased retirement, and commencing a super income stream. The other eight act once, in their own year, and ignore any end year.

Event	What it does
Salary change	Replaces the salary with the new figure, which is in that year’s dollars and grows from there
Change in living expenses	Applied to the joint actor it replaces the household figure; applied to a person it replaces theirs
Change in investment strategy	Moves the person’s growth weighting for super, in both accumulation and pension phase
Phased retirement	Multiplies salary by the part-time fraction
One-off income	Adds to income for the year; taxable only if you tick it
One-off expense	Adds to that year’s expenses
Goal outflow	A cash demand in its year that is kept out of the expenses column; if it cannot be funded it shows as that year’s shortfall, and the goal coverage strip reports it by name
Investment lump sum	Deposits to or withdraws from investments
Carry-forward concessional contribution	Adds catch-up cap room for the year; refused if the person’s super balance is at or above the carry-forward threshold
Bring-forward non-concessional contribution	Moves a lump from cash or investments into super, clamped to cap room; a request above the annual room opens a bring-forward window sized by the total super balance tiers
Downsizer contribution	Credits the pack’s downsizer cap to super for one person, or both spouses, at 55 or over
Property sale	Assesses the capital gain for that financial year, routes the net proceeds (sale price less any replacement cost) to cash, investments, super or the mortgage, and leaves the replacement value as the property. Buying dearer than you sell is not modelled.
Commence super income stream	Starts a pension from the person’s accumulation balance. Below preservation age it stays pending and says so. At 65 or once fully retired it is a retirement-phase pension; before that it is a transition-to-retirement pension limited to 10% of the opening balance a year. An end year commutes it back to accumulation.

The run checks every event before the first year is projected and warns you about any that will never fire: dated after the horizon, or with an end year before its start year. A step change dated before the first projected year is treated as already in force.

Where two events of the same kind apply to one person in the same year, the later one wins.

Caps and thresholds the run applies for you

The concessional and non-concessional caps, the total super balance thresholds, the transfer balance cap, preservation age and the minimum drawdown rates are all read from the regulatory pack for the financial year of the projected year, not for today.

Non-concessional contributions of every kind (recurring, movement or event) draw on one room ledger per person per year, consumed in the order events, recurring, movements. Room is zero from age 75, and zero in any year where the person’s start-of-year super balance is at or above the threshold, and both refusals appear in the warnings.

The Age Pension and senior tax offsets

The Age Pension is modelled only when the household’s marital status is recorded in the fact-find. Without it, the run models no Age Pension and no seniors offset, and it tells you why, once, if anyone reaches qualifying age inside the horizon.

When it runs, the test uses the household’s combined financial assets (super, investments and cash), assessable property (anything not marked as the residence), other income, and both partners’ salaries with the Work Bonus applied per person. Home ownership comes from a property row typed as the residence. Deeming rates come from the pack. A member with no recorded age is assessed but never qualifies.

The figure is indicative modelling from your assumptions, not a Centrelink determination, and the cashflow table says so beneath it.

The seniors and pensioners tax offset applies from qualifying age. In a couple, one spouse’s unused offset transfers to the other; that transfer is skipped, with a warning, where the spouse holds an untaxed super element, because guessing low there would understate tax.

Reading the results

Showing picks the scope. Household is the sum of everyone. A person’s view is their own balances plus their share of anything jointly held, at the ownership fractions recorded in the fact-find, and the note beneath the selector says so. A workspace prefilled before ownership shares were recorded shows that person’s own holdings only and tells you to refresh and recalculate.

The eight summary tiles:

Tile	Meaning
Final net wealth	Net wealth in the last projected year, at the chosen scope
Net wealth (today’s dollars)	The same figure divided by cumulative inflation over the horizon
Net wealth positive	A tick if net wealth never goes below zero in any year
Expenses funded	Household only, whatever the scope. “Funded to age N” if spendable assets (super, investments and cash, never property) cover expenses every year; otherwise the first year they do not
Total contributions	Net super contributions over the horizon, after contributions tax
Total tax paid	Personal tax summed over the horizon
Debt-free year	First year total debt is zero, or “Not cleared”
Peak net wealth	The highest year

The year-by-year table has three views. Cashflow shows gross income, tax, net income, Age Pension, expenses and surplus. Balances shows super, investments, cash, property, drawable (spendable) assets, debt and net wealth. Tax shows gross income, taxable income, the tax estimate and the effective rate, which is tax divided by gross income. Ages are shown per person, never one age standing for the household.

The chart has a Wealth mode and a Super mode, a “Today’s dollars” toggle, and chips that switch each series on and off. The lower panel shows the year’s cash flows as bars.

Below the tables, when anyone holds a pension, an income-stream panel sets out phase, payments and transfer balance cap position by year.

Warnings

Warnings are the model telling you where it guessed, clamped or refused. They are not errors: the run still completes. Where the same warning recurs across consecutive years it is collapsed into one line with a year count you can expand.

The ones a first reader should know:

• No retirement age recorded, assuming 65. Set one on the person if 65 is wrong; salary, contributions and the pension start all hang off it.
• Marital status is not recorded. No Age Pension and no seniors offset were modelled. Record it in the fact-find.
• Unfunded shortfall or unfunded retirement shortfall for a year and amount. Income plus every drawable balance could not cover that year’s expenses and goals.
• Super component data was missing or inconsistent. The balance was treated as fully taxed element.
• Salary sacrifice exceeds remaining concessional cap room or exceeds salary, clamped.
• Movement N: pool_empty / pool_insufficient / cap_reached, and the account-blend notice described under Movements.
• Event N never applies or is already in force.
• Interest on jointly held deductible debt is deducted by nobody, or the recorded ownership attributes the rest to no member. Nothing says who owns the loan, or only part of it is owned by someone this projection taxes. The balance still grows; record the ownership on the liability to claim the deduction.
• Held jointly and states assessable income. Joint investment income is not taxed to anyone, so it is not modelled at all; the account still grows at its capital return.

If the regulatory data for a projected year is unavailable (for example a financial year whose figures have not yet been approved), the run returns no rows at all rather than a projection built on placeholders, and the page says so.

Refresh, drift and snapshots

When the fact-find changes after a workspace was created, the banner “SSOT data has changed (N fields)” appears. The fields watched are salary incomes, expense amounts, super balances, asset values and liability balances.

Refresh re-reads the fact-find and updates two things: the baseline the banner compares against, and the joint actor’s ownership shares. It does not overwrite any balance or rate you have typed into the workspace. If shares moved, recalculate: the on-screen figures still describe the old shares until you do. If the refresh can read no fact-find data at all it refuses and leaves the baseline alone.

Prefill on an existing source rebuilds from scratch and discards every movement, event and assumption change you have made, so reach for Refresh first.

Snapshot (a saved copy of one run, frozen as it stood when you took it) files that copy under a label. It is recomputed on the server from the saved workspace, so it always matches what was saved, and a run that errors cannot be snapshotted. Up to three snapshots can be overlaid on the chart at once as ghost lines against the live run, which is how you show a client “before and after” a change.

Saving and publishing

Save puts the workspace under the active household, or under the active client for the three calculators, or as a global template with no client attached. Load filters the same three ways.

Publish runs the projection again on the server, stores the result, and marks it visible to the client portal. The advice document’s projections chapter, the goal chips and the Chart Room all read the latest publication, not the working copy, so an edit is invisible to them until you publish again. A banner asks you to republish when the household’s shown projection was published before the current model and so carries no funding verdict.

Optimise and Resilience

Optimise household keeps the household’s total salary sacrifice, investment contribution and non-concessional contribution as they are and searches for a better split between members. It needs at least two eligible members for a lever, searches at most three, and reports up to five bundles, each of which has to improve final (or today’s-dollars) net wealth by at least $500 across the whole projection. A member who is ineligible for a lever can only be moved down.

Resilience re-runs the model two hundred times with returns drawn at random around your assumptions (growth spread 16 percentage points, defensive 4.5, and inflation 1.5 if you vary it), then shows the 10th to 90th percentile bands around the deterministic line. Two stylised replays are added: a sharp crash at retirement and a flat decade from retirement. “Funded probability” is the share of paths where household net wealth stays above zero every year, and each fact-find goal with an amount and a year inside the horizon gets a probability of being met. The random draws use a fixed seed, so running it twice on the same workspace gives the same fan.

The three calculators

These run in the browser from the boxes on the left. They do not read the fact-find, do not feed documents, and do not share assumptions with the General tab.

Super Accumulation projects one balance from the current age to the retirement age. Each year: concessional contributions are salary times the SG rate plus salary sacrifice, clamped to the pack cap; non-concessional contributions are clamped to their cap; earnings are the balance times the return times one minus the earnings tax rate; then salary grows. The “Est. pension income” card is simply 4% of the final balance.

ABP Drawdown runs a pension balance from the current age to the end age. The pension paid is the statutory minimum, a fixed dollar amount (optionally indexed, and never below the minimum), or a fixed percentage (never below the minimum). Earnings are the balance times the net return, then the pension and any lump sum come off. The minimum comes from the same regulatory pack the General tab reads, fetched when the page loads; if the pack cannot be read the tab says so and declines to calculate rather than falling back to a table of its own. It therefore applies the same floor the engine does (no minimum below 55) where the tab’s own table used to answer 4% at any age. Ages outside the range the age box allows are pulled back into it, including when a link sets the age for you.

Investment Growth compounds a lump sum plus regular contributions at the chosen frequency. The net return is the gross return less the fee rate; earnings are taxed at the marginal rate you choose from the pack’s brackets, per period. Capital gains tax on a sale at the end of each year is assessed on the server against the rules for that year, treating the whole holding as bought at the start. If you choose no marginal rate, earnings run untaxed and the balances are shown before any capital gains tax, and the chip says so.

What the model does not do

• Model self-managed super funds, companies or trusts as actors. A workspace containing one will not run.
• Tax the joint actor, or attribute joint investment income to the members.
• Read rental income from a property row; state it as other income on the person instead.
• Repay deductible debt. Surplus pays down non-deductible debt only, so a deductible balance compounds for the whole horizon (see above).
• Attribute a jointly held loan’s interest where the records do not say who owns it. The interest is still charged, nobody deducts it, and the run warns.
• Model lump-sum withdrawals from accumulation super under 60.
• Model excess-contribution charges or Division 293 tax.
• Fund a replacement home that costs more than the one sold.
• Model entity income or entity tax within a person’s scoped view.