The purpose of this Excel file is to obtain a rational spending/saving plan for the future, based on conservative projections of household income. In order to use this Excel file, you will need to obtain estimates of Social Security and other pensions, as the spreadsheet will not calculate those. Note in general: all amounts should be in today’s dollars, so think about what a salary or item would be today. Never insert rows or columns. You should never turn off protection unless you want to make a change in the program, as it is very likely you will make the program unworkable.
Paper presented at the 2008 Conference of the Academy of Financial Services:
Hanna, S. D. (2008). An Excel spreadsheet for lifetime consumption smoothing. Proceedings of the Academy of Financial Services.
For more information on the concepts behind the program, see article by Hanna, Fan, and Chang in the journal Financial Counseling and Planning.
File to use (Updated Sept. 23, 2011)
Please note: this is Copyright Sherman D. Hanna, August, 2008, but I grant the right for others to use it as long as the authorship of the original program is listed, and descriptions of any uses and improvements are emailed to hanna.1@osu.edu
Acrobat file with step-by-step instructions
*A previous version of the program was developed in the Visual Basic language by the Family Resource Management Expert Systems Laboratory at Ohio State University, and is still available, although there may be some difficulties in getting that version to run in current versions of Windows Operating Systems.