Good Day,
I’m attempting to account for estimated Tax Return and Child Benefits as in Income in my categories and cash flow sheets.
To do so I’ve first created a line for ‘Benefits’ in the Categories sheet, marked it as Type - Income in order to get it show up in my other sheets as well, and applied an estimated average Per Month on the Categories page. This amount to $9600/year currently.
Moving over to the Cash Flow Forecast tab, I need to create Life events for when the kids turn 18 and the child benefits portion drops off, so I’ve one line item for 2038-2054, since 2038 is roughly when the child benefits would end, where I replace the 9600 with 5000.
The issue is that when ‘active’ this drops the cash flow from 2038 onward by roughly -37,000/year, rather than the expected 4600-6400ish (I have income set at 3% growth).
In testing the scenario I decided to enter a line for ‘Benefits’ from 2026 (my start date for modelling) to 2038 (the date of the previous entry), and put in a flat 9600/year with no change/year to remove income growth for this source from the equation. This ALSO drops the cash flow projections despite being a positive number. The drop is about $20,000 in year 1, 2026, which should be a directly even replacement.
I am making a data entry mistake or I am fundamentally misunderstanding how the system handles life events/income? If I remove the ‘Type- Income’ from the categories sheet it seems to treat it properly… but then other sheets like ‘Spending Trends’ don’t recognize it as income.