Hello everyone, and welcome to the Willowfinch Onboarding series. This is going to be a short series of videos that take you through getting started with your Willowfinch and making the most of the tools and data that you can, use to find your happy place. The location and properties where you can get the most out of your financial lifestyle and other personal goals and needs. You'll be able to enter as much information as you want in this process, whether you have a whole bunch of information you wanna put in and dive deep right away, or if you wanna just get started with the basics and start having fun playing around with the tools, we'll go through those steps and you will be able to get.
The customized projections and insights that Willowfinch makes possible. So I'm gonna take you through the steps of getting started, and then we'll go through how to keep up with your, your new numbers or goals as you know, life changes and, and you move along and things so that you can continue to get those up-to-date projections. Because one of the best things about the way that Willowfinch works is that it's constantly updating and pulling new data and you're able to see.
The kinds of insights and projections that let you make adjustments to your course to stay on track for stuff that matters to you, even as things in either your situation or local situations change. So this is the onboarding screen that you'll see the first time you log in, and we do have these pop up areas that will highlight what to do and help you walk through the steps. So we're gonna do those now. And if you ever need any help, please feel free to reach out to the Willowfinch team using the support in the portal itself or finding us on email or through the contact forms.
So we'll click next and then we'll get started. Just as a reminder, all of the data will be encrypted to ensure it stays secure. You can give as little or as much as you want off the bat. You can use the default information too. I'll be using that through several of the points just so that we have the public video with the default information. And you can put your personal information in where it makes sense to you and you can always add it if it changes or if you want to get more detailed, and thorough data and projections back. It's not something that you have to do a certain way.
You know, at the beginning of the, the process, and it's something that you can adjust as you learn more about the program if you'd like. So you'll click here on my goals and we'll get started.
Okay, so the first thing that it asks you is about some of your current living situation. Before we get started, I just wanna note that these popups that come to help you through your onboarding, the little tour, They're set up to move forward with when you click the next button. So if you do need to use the back button at any point to make an edit to something, it will cause the tour steps to be a bit out of sync with the sections that you're editing. If that starts still confusing, you can always just click the X to and the tour for then. And if you still need help moving through the steps, you can always watch the video. You can find it on our YouTube channel. You can click the link that'll be in this box up here when it's live, or you can reach out to us for some help. So just to let you know that if you see that happen, that's what's going on.
And let's take a look at the first thing that it asks. So it's asking about your, your current information for location, because then it can compare the data to the other places that you might be considering. Remember that more data does. More details about your current situation does give more specific comparisons for the projections and personal insights, but the defaults are here. If you wanna get started without adding any personal details, you can always come back and update them later, get more personal projections and see your heat map update once you've got some properties saved. And then when you're done entering, what you'd you'd like here, or if you just wanna use the defaults, you'll click next to continue on with the, the onboarding tour.
So if you wanted to enter your details, you could click here. And change them because this is a public video.I'm not going to right now, but you could. And then you would click next right here. And we'll move on to step two, which is talking about your monthly housing costs. So this is telling us about your current housing expenses, property tax, general monthly living expenses, and it'll compare that in the data to show you, you know, how, how the different locations you might save with your favorite properties lines up with what you currently have, because you'll be setting some savings goals and things if you would like when you've entered what you like here or if you just wanna use the defaults.
Again, these are kind of just general numbers that will help you get started. You can click next,and then we move on to your desired mortgage. So if you're setting goals for your, your potential housing search, and it's okay if you aren't actively searching right now, this is to help you game plan, uh, explore different scenarios, all of that kind of stuff. It doesn't have to be exactly what you're looking at at the moment. These variables are a great way to look at how it can impact your principle and interest payments over the life of a potential mortgage. So you're looking at playing with different preferred down payment percentages, interest rates, term lengths. Use your best guess for what your, your numbers would likely be right now or use the defaults.
But don't forget that you can come back and play with these later because you can drop your down payment to zero, set different target interest rates, see how that would change the projections and numbers between your current location and any possible, locations that you're comparing in your, your goal setting or search. So when you're ready with this, you would enter anything that you want to, you click next. And it moves us onto this last page of this onboarding section for us where it's going to ask some basic information that helps the, the My Income section really calculate amazingly helpful information for how the different income streams and goals that you set and your personal age and whatever lines up that you've entered or compared to the defaults can really impact your long-term 10 year projections that it calculates.
So this is where you would pick, you know, your tax filing status for the household that would be moving. Person one is showing here, if you do click two person, it'll give you two birthday sections. The reason that this needs to be entered is if you do decide to include calculations for income streams like. Your IRA and 401k, it needs to make sure that you're calculating based on when you're actually qualified to draw that income. Don't worry, you still get to pick when you want to start your draw. You don't have to start the calculations right when you're qualified, but it does wanna make sure that it doesn't kick out any information that would be incorrect because you wouldn't actually be qualified at that point in time. So those numbers are calculated based on the half of the year that your birthday falls in. That's why we don't ask specific months or dates, just which half of the year. So you would select that if you're okay with it, you can always use the default.
And then you'll move on to where it talks about your annual pre-tax income. So this is the amount that you generally would enter onto your tax forms before you start taking any deductions. Again, you can always use the default, but you also can come in here and adjust this. So if you see changes in a year, And you come back in and want to update your, your projections, you can do that. If you want to play with what a scenario would look like, if you found it, you know, a different job that had a significantly different income between now and retirement, you could also do that. This is just a great way to look at personalizing those projections for future budget.
And then this is your annual target savings. So this is a goal for your monthly budget reduction in the new scenario. Typically retirement, but possibly semi-retirement or relocation for a new job or something like that. So how much would you like to save each month? In that new location or living situation compared to the annual pre-tax income that you just entered. So this number is really important because it's really what gets the most value out of your property heat maps, it adds two of the colors.
You know, we have red and green that are the default colors that show something, you know, in the red or in in the green when it comes to the numbers. But yellow and orange will show you if you know how close a property would be getting you towards these saving goals as well. Not just the comparison of. The, the total amount. So, if you're not sure what to put here and you do still want to have some kind of target savings, you can always start with the common re retirement goal of a 20% reduction, where people aim to leave 80% of their current income needs as their retirement income needs because they're anticipating a slightly lower fixed income situation.
You can also talk to a financial planner, which we always highly recommend to find a, a more specific savings goal for yourself. But you'll put that there. And then you'll let the system know. Do you want to be looking at retirement options where you're switching your source of income to something like social security pensions or a 401k, or are you looking at moving and continuing to work? Semi-retirement, change of careers or jobs or something like that? Where you would not be pulling. Something like a 401k, IRA security, social security, excuse me, or a pension. So "no" takes those incomes out of your projections. On the next section, yes, enters them in and you'll be able to give more details about what that will look like.
Same thing here. If you are anticipating needing to purchase health insurance before age 65, you can click yes and we'll make sure to include that data in your maps and projections for the different locations. So once you're done filling out the parts of this section that you want to, or to use the default information, you'll come down here, hit update profile, and you will be done with your first section of onboarding.
And head over to the next section, my Income, where it'll look at your numbers in action. You can update things like when you would make the draws on IRA, 401k like that, if that's something that you picked or to update the changes in your income. That you would be anticipating if you're, if you're looking at a income or career change rather than a full retirement.
So when you're ready for that, go up here, enter what you'd like, come here and click update profile, and we'll move on to the next section in the next video.
