Life Cycle Savings Program

Sherman Hanna Page for Excel Version of Life Cycle Savings Program

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.

Note – the files below are in xlsx format. The differences between versions are related to the defaults for graphs, otherwise the files are essentially the same.

The original Modigliani model assumed that a rational consumer who knew with certainty future income and the date of death and faced a zero real interest rate and no discounting of the utility of future consumption would plan for equal consumption each period in the future. It is a good idea to try my simple Excel version of the original model before trying the more complex versions.

File to use for heads under the age of 26

File to use for heads age 26 to 45

File to use for heads age 46 to 60

For heads age 61 to 73

File to use for heads age 74 to 85

Acrobat file with step-by-step instructions
Please note: this is Copyright Sherman D. Hanna, 2008, 2016, 2017 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 sdhanna@gmail.com