A reflection for planners navigating what comes next
For decades, lifetime cash-flow planning tools have played a central role in professional financial planning. They brought structure, consistency, and a sense of rigour to conversations about the future. Many advisers built their confidence — and their practices — around them.
So it’s understandable that the emergence of AI-led planning tools raises questions.
Is this just a faster calculator?
A cheaper alternative?
Or something more fundamental?
This article is written for traditional planners — not to dismiss what has come before, but to explore, carefully and constructively, what is now becoming possible.
What traditional lifetime cash-flow tools are genuinely good at
Traditional tools such as Voyant, CashCalc, Timeline and others were designed for a specific purpose and era. At their best, they:
- Model financial capital over time
- Stress-test assumptions around returns, inflation, longevity, and withdrawal rates
- Support adviser defensibility and regulatory narratives
- Create a common framework for late-stage accumulation and decumulation planning
For clients approaching retirement, this work matters. Small assumption changes can have significant financial consequences, and disciplined modelling has real value.
Nothing in that should be dismissed.
But it is only part of the picture.
The limitation is not technical — it’s structural
Traditional lifetime cash-flow tools do not merely over-weight financial capital.
They exclude human capital strategies almost entirely.
This isn’t because human capital is unimportant.
It’s because the industry has no established way to monetise it.
Human capital strategies include:
- Career direction and reinvention
- Skill development and earning capacity
- Health, energy, and longevity choices
- Business creation and creativity
- Time, meaning, resilience, and adaptability
These strategies:
- Don’t sit on a balance sheet
- Don’t generate commission or AUM fees
- Often reduce dependence on financial products
As a result, they sit outside most planning software — and often outside planning conversations — even though they are the primary drivers of wealth for most of adult life.
Total Wealth reframes the question entirely
At the Academy of Life Planning, we work from a simple but powerful premise:
Total Wealth = Human Capital + Financial Capital
This changes how we interpret “complexity”.
A person in their mid-30s may have:
- Relatively simple financial capital
- But extremely complex, high-value human capital
Their future wealth will be shaped far more by:
- Choices about work, learning, health, purpose, and direction
than by portfolio optimisation alone.
Later in life, the balance shifts:
- Financial capital becomes more sensitive
- Human capital runway narrows
Both matter — but at different times, and in different ways.
Traditional tools are excellent at modelling the later chapter.
They struggle to engage meaningfully with the earlier ones.
What AI-led cash-flow planning changes
AI-based planning tools introduce a different architecture.
From real practitioner use and feedback, we see that AI planning:
- Is dialogue-led, not template-led
- Scales depth based on the individual, not the software
- Can move fluidly between:
- Financial projections
- Life scenarios
- Human capital strategies
- Produces outputs that are:
- Explainable
- Narrative-based
- Client-readable
Crucially, AI can hold context:
- Life goals
- Trade-offs
- Constraints
- Values
- Multiple possible futures
This allows planning to begin with life and then design money around it — not the other way around.
What practitioners are learning in practice
User experience has been revealing.
What works well:
- Keeping the core model simple
- Allowing clients to self-serve where appropriate
- Using prompts to deepen analysis when needed
- Producing clear summaries comparing “base case” and “preferred future”
What works better than software complexity:
- Layered practitioner support
- Optional guidance sessions
- Sense-checking assumptions
- Helping clients steer their dialogue with AI
This approach preserves:
- Client agency
- Practitioner wisdom
- Simplicity where simplicity is appropriate
Rather than building ever more complex tools, the focus shifts to better conversations.
A change in purpose, not just tooling
Perhaps the most important distinction is this:
Traditional lifetime cash-flow tools evolved to serve:
- Adviser business models
- Compliance processes
- Product-centric systems
AI-led planning tools evolve to serve:
- Human understanding
- Agency
- Choice
- Life-first decision-making
This isn’t about replacing advisers.
It’s about repositioning them.
From:
Controller of outcomes
To:
Guide, interpreter, and steward of better decisions
The quiet conclusion
AI cash-flow planning tools are not “better calculators”.
They represent a shift from:
- System-centred planning
to - Person-centred planning
They make visible what was previously invisible.
They give language to human capital.
They invite clients into the planning process as active participants.
Traditional tools helped professionalise planning.
AI tools help humanise it.
And that is not a rejection of the past —
it’s an evolution into something more complete.
If you are a planner standing on the bridge between old models and new possibilities, the Academy of Life Planning exists to walk that bridge with you — thoughtfully, ethically, and at your pace.
Academy of Life Planning 