Overseas shares in Australian dollars, property sales planned through to settlement, and figures put right

This update covers three releases. The big changes are overseas shares counting in Australian dollars, property sales that can be planned right through to where the money ends up, and fixes to several figures that were wrong. Some of those fixes will change your numbers, and a few plans will ask for a figure the app used to fill in on its own. This post explains which ones, and why.

Overseas shares now count in Australian dollars

If you hold shares priced in another currency, such as US dollars, the app used to treat the price as if it were already in Australian dollars. It now converts them, using exchange rates from the same place the share prices come from.

Before converting anything, the app asks you to confirm how many shares you hold in each of those holdings. Here is why. The old screen warned that these holdings were being counted as Australian dollars, and some people worked around it by changing the number of shares until the total looked right. That leaves a share count that is not real, often with a fraction in it. Converting that number would make the total more wrong, not less. So nothing is converted until you confirm the count, and a banner at the top of your workspace lists the holdings still waiting.

Until you confirm a holding, it is shown in its own currency instead of being labelled as Australian dollars.

Shares listed on the London Stock Exchange are also valued correctly now. Their prices are quoted in pence, and the app was rounding them to the nearest penny, which made cheap shares look worth up to a third more than they were.

Plan a property sale all the way through

A planned property sale now shows the full picture:

• What you paid, for tax purposes. The sale screen shows the cost base the sale is measured against (the purchase price plus eligible costs, used to work out capital gains tax) and how that number was reached.
• Which sales are planned for each property. Each property lists the sales planned for it.
• What the sale actually leaves you with. Anywhere that money is being directed, the app shows what the sale brings in after selling costs and paying out the loan. The working is behind an info button, so the screen stays readable.

With Premium, you can also choose where the money from a sale goes in your plan. It moves on the day the sale settles, follows that date if you change it, and is never more than the sale actually brings in. The cashflow view shows where the money went in the year the sale settles.

If a one-off expense, like a renovation, relies partly on a planned sale to pay for it, the expense now says so and names the sale and its settlement date. It only says this when your plan really does depend on that sale. If the rest of your money could cover the expense anyway, it says nothing.

Some figures were wrong, and are now fixed

We found and fixed each of these. If your numbers move after this update, the new figures are the correct ones.

• A large one-off expense in the same year as a property sale could stop your plan. Being a few hundred dollars short could end the projection with no explanation. One-off expenses are now paid for the same way whether or not a property sells that year.
• FIRE could be shown as reached on a plan that runs out of money. Reaching FIRE means your money lasts. If your plan runs out at any point, it no longer shows FIRE as reached next to the warning.
• Journey figures could be too low. The Journey compares where you are with where your plan expected you to be. When it saved a copy of your plan for that comparison, it could drop one of two entries that looked alike, so part of the plan went missing. This affected people with two investment properties, people paying the extra super tax for high earners (Division 293), and retirees drawing extra spending money. In one example we checked, the plan was out by about $77,000 a year.

A few plans will ask for a missing number

Until recently, leaving the selling costs or buying costs blank saved them as $0, and a planned property purchase could assume every expense was tax deductible. Neither of those was ever your answer. New entries stopped doing this in the previous update, but plans saved before then still had them.

Those plans now ask. A sale or purchase that was saved without costs shows the field empty, explains that an earlier version saved a blank as $0, and asks for the real figure. If your costs really were nothing, enter 0 and it will be kept.

While a field is waiting, your projection stays on screen. It fades slightly and a banner says what needs fixing, instead of the figures disappearing. The same goes for any other problem: your last figures stay visible and are clearly marked as out of date, instead of an empty space. And if a planned sale's settlement date has already passed, the app now says so in plain words with a link to that sale, instead of showing an error message.

Mortgage dates that stay correct

The mortgage used to ask for your next repayment date, which was out of date a month later. It now asks for your most recent repayment, so the date stays correct over time. If you enter a date more than one repayment ahead, it tells you that repayments before that date are not counted. Extra repayments now use the same date, so there is one date to keep up to date instead of two.

Smaller things

• If you start a planned change and then move between Current Position, Your Plan, Scenarios and Model Settings, what you typed is kept. It also can no longer overwrite a figure you saved somewhere else in the meantime.
• A "Change retirement age" action now says clearly that it does not affect your projection yet. Setting a retirement age for a scenario is coming. Until then, it no longer looks like it does something it does not.
• Premium features are now marked with the word Premium and invite you in, rather than showing a row of padlocks or a jewel icon.
• On a phone, How it works is now on the action bar, and the guided tour waits for your projection to load so it runs properly.