FP21T0 Plan Instructions PDF

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The Financial Plan Assignment is all about you, your aspirations and your plan for achieving your life and financial goals. It involves developing a comprehensive financial plan for the rest of your life. It is one of the most useful assignments that you will undertake at university. Each section of your financial plan provides you with the opportunity to reflect deeply on the theory covered in the course and to make practical, specific and detailed application of that theory to your expected future life stages. You should work on your financial plan gradually during the term as you cover each Unit. The assignment is worth 50% of your assessment for this course. The financial plan that you will develop is far more comprehensive (and useful) than a typical ‘Statement of Advice (SOA)’ that a financial adviser would prepare for a client. This is because the focus of this course is on understanding the broad issues that financial advisers need to consider when advising clients. The follow-on course to this one, FINS5537 Financial Planning Advice and Ethics, will focus on the process of developing a compliant and ethical SOA for clients. This is an individual assignment. Either copying the work of another student or basing your financial plan on another student’s work is academic misconduct and will result in a fail grade being awarded for this course.

An important step for writing a financial plan for a client is to first develop a comprehensive financial plan for your yourself. Basically, it is important that you ‘get your own house in order’ before you start providing advice to anyone else. The objective of this assignment is to help you to develop a detailed financial plan that will act as a roadmap for the rest of your life. It also provides you with an opportunity to reflect on the theory covered in each Unit and to think about how to practically apply that theory to your current and expected future situation.

The financial plan assignment is worth 50% of your assessment for this course.

The due date for the financial plan assignment is as follows: Assessment component

Due Date*

Financial Plan Assignment

3:00PM Sat 6 Feb 2021

* All times are Sydney time

The penalty for late submission of the Financial Plan Assignment is 5 marks per day (out of 100) for each day (or part day) it is submitted after the deadline. This penalty applies to your score for the financial plan (not the maximum possible score). For example, if your raw score is 70/100 and the plan is submitted 2 days late, a 10 mark penalty will apply and so your score would be reduced to 60/100. Note that there is a small ‘grace period’ of a few minutes after the submission time to allow for slow internet connections or slow website performance. No penalty will apply if the submission is within this ‘grace period’. Please do not email me asking if your submission falls within this grace period. Any financial plan received more than 7 days after the due date (without approved special consideration) will automatically be awarded a score of zero.

Special consideration will only be granted in exceptional cases. You are responsible for developing your financial plan gradually as you work through each Unit of the course materials. You should work on your financial plan as you cover each Unit and avoid leaving it until last minute. You are responsible for completing your financial plan well before the due date/time to allow for unexpected circumstances or illness. Being ill during the last week before the date of submission will not normally constitute grounds for special consideration. If special consideration is granted, the maximum extension that will be granted is 7 days from the original due date. Any financial plans received more than 7 days from the original due date will automatically be awarded a score of zero. An application for Special Consideration together with supporting documentation must be submitted online within 3 working days of the due date. The process for applying for special consideration is here: https://student.unsw.edu.au/special-consideration

This is an individual assessment. You are permitted to discuss the contents of this assessment with your family, a spouse or partner. However, all written work, research and supporting calculations must be your own work. Seeking assistance with your written work or financial modelling constitutes academic misconduct. Providing assistance to any other students also constitutes academic misconduct. Copying or paraphrasing the work of any other student (from current or previous terms) constitutes academic misconduct. Copying the work of another student and then changing the details to reflect your situation and strategies constitutes academic misconduct. Using another student’s financial plan as a ‘reference’ for you while you complete your own financial plan is also academic misconduct. If another student approaches you for assistance, please note the time, date and details of the incident and email the details to me at [email protected] . UNSW has no tolerance for students who are dishonest or seek to obtain an unfair advantage over other students. Academic misconduct is a serious offence. It can result in zero being awarded for this assessment, a failure grade for the course and/or removal from the University.

You should note that all students at UNSW have access to the full suite of Microsoft Office 365 products for free (on both Windows and Mac). This includes downloadable versions of the entire Microsoft Office suite to 15 devices (5 desktops, 5 tablets and 5 mobiles). The steps for downloading the latest version of MS Office are as follows: 1. Go to https://login.microsoftonline.com 2. Login with the same zPass that you use for Moodle using the ‘[email protected]’ version of your UNSW student email. For example: [email protected] 3. Click the ‘Install Office’ button at the top right of the screen. 4. Choose ‘Office 365 apps’ and follow the on-screen directions from there. More information is available here (although it is a little out of date): https://student.unsw.edu.au/sites/all/files/uploads/group228/notices/office-proplus.pdf

Please only use Arial (PC) or Helvetica (Mac) fonts to ensure font compatibility. You will be submitting your financial plan in Microsoft Word format because it is much easier for me to mark in this format. I will be marking your assignment on a Windows computer which can cause some font compatibility issues for students who use Mac.

You should choose a text size that is easy for me to read on-screen. For body text with Arial or Helvetica, this should generally be 11 points. You can choose your own font size for headings.

The body text colour should generally be black on a white background to make it easy to read on-screen. You may use coloured text for headings but please choose colours that are easy to read on-screen. You should generally avoid using coloured backgrounds or images behind your text because they often make text difficult to read.

You may choose your own margins and line spacing.

You should submit your assignment in Microsoft Word .docx or .doc format. Microsoft Word format is preferred to the standard PDF format because I have a large number of financial plans to mark (in a fairly small time). Microsoft Word documents are faster for me to open and read. As a student at UNSW, you have access to free downloadable versions of the full Microsoft Office suite of products. See the ‘Software’ section on page 4. If you do not wish to use Microsoft Word, please make sure that your software can export to a Microsoft Word compatible format (such as .doc).

Please name your financial plan using the following file name format (and extension): zID Plan.docx For example, if your student zID is z1234567, your file should be named: z1234567 Plan.docx

There is no word limit or page limit for this assignment. This is your plan and so you can ‘invest’ as much time and detail into it as you like. In past terms, most financial plans are somewhere between 3,000 words and 9,000 words.

As a general principle, you do not need to reference the concepts covered in my lecture slides unless the lecture slides themselves cite another source or it makes sense to do so given how you are using the concept in your assignment. In most cases, I’m expecting you to reference other sources that you have identified to support the ideas in your financial plan including websites, articles, books or videos. For websites, I’m usually happy with just the author (or company), the date that it was accessed and a URL (preferably hyperlinked). For example: "Domain Property Group, accessed 16 December 2020, https://www.domain.com.au" As a general principle, you do not need to reference any pictures that you use in your financial plan. The standard method for referencing at UNSW is in-text (Harvard). However, it is easier for me to mark your assignment on-screen if you use the footnote and bibliography method (Oxford). As such, you may use either in-text or footnote methods for this assignment (or a combination of both). Whether you use in-text citations or footnotes, you should always include a list of references at the end of your financial plan so that I can see all your sources in one location. More information on the footnote (Oxford) method is here: https://student.unsw.edu.au/footnote-bibliography-or-oxford-referencing-system More information on the in-text (Harvard) method is here: https://student.unsw.edu.au/harvard-referencing

This assignment includes personal information that is both private and confidential. Your assignment is not used for any other purpose except to provide you with a mark for this assessment. It will not be used for academic research or commercial purposes. You should also note that more than 100 students undertake this course each term and so it is unlikely that I will remember any of your personal information after I finish marking them all (my memory isn’t that good!). However, you should note that your financial plan will be uploaded onto the Turnitin plagiarism detection service for the sole purpose of checking for similarity with other assignments in past, present or future terms. If you are concerned about the privacy of the information, you are welcome to change, omit or redact any of the specific details that you are concerned about (such as information about your current income or assets). Doing so will likely make very little difference to the usefulness of your financial plan, since you can simply change those details back to the correct values after submission.

If you have a spouse or partner, you are also welcome to perform this assignment based on your ‘collective’ situation and ‘collective’ plan for the future. Discussing your financial plan assignment with your spouse or partner does not constitute academic misconduct. However, the written financial plan, supporting research and calculations should be your own work. For more information, see ‘Individual assessment’ on page 4.

The financial plan assignment is designed to assess the key learning outcomes of this course. Many of these learning outcomes are specific to the Australian financial system. This presents a problem for overseas students who plan to live abroad after they graduate, since the taxation and retirement saving systems in those countries may be quite different from Australia. Whether or not you plan to live abroad for a significant component of your life after graduation, for the purposes of this assessment you must assume that you will be living in Australia for most of your life and be subject to the Australian taxation and retirement savings system. After you complete this course, you are of course welcome to change your financial plan to reflect your plans to live abroad. Please only use Australian dollars as your currency for this assignment. You can convert any foreign values in Australian dollars at the current exchange rate.

Some devoutly religious students may believe that either receiving or paying interest on borrowed funds (even under a profit-sharing arrangement using Islamic Banking) is incompatible with their religious faith. Inclusiveness is important at UNSW and I personally have the utmost respect for these religious beliefs. However, being unable to borrow or lend at interest makes many of the financial strategies and products covered in this course unviable and can therefore make it difficult to assess the learning outcomes of the course. As such, if you hold these religious views, one approach that you can take with this financial plan assessment is to base it on a ‘hypothetical thirdparty’ (a friend or client) that is willing and able to borrow or lend money using Islamic Banking services under a suitable ‘profit sharing’ arrangement. Obviously, you are welcome to make appropriate changes to this financial plan document after submission to reflect your personal beliefs and your own preferred financial and investment strategies. If you have further questions or would like to discuss an alternative approach, please contact me at [email protected] and I will be happy to discuss it further.

This is your financial plan and so an informal writing style is acceptable in this assignment. You may write in the first-person if you would like to do so. You may also make selective use of bullet-points and tables where appropriate. However, you are reminded that this is also an assessment for a university course. You are expected to justify your ideas by linking them back to concepts covered in the course or from other cited sources wherever possible. As a general principle, it is not acceptable to justify statements in your financial plan as being true because you “feel that they are true”. For example, “I am going to invest all my money in bitcoin because I feel as though this will be a good investment for the long-term.” This form of reasoning is generally not acceptable at university. If you believe that bitcoin is a good investment for the long-term, you need to justify this with logical reasoning based on theories covered in this course and/or evidence from other sources (that are cited). You need to clearly explain your reasoning.

The following instructions on the suggested content for each section are oriented towards a grade of somewhere between 65 to 80. If you are time-poor due to your workload in other courses or work commitments, you may choose to miss out some of the suggested components in each section. However, doing so may adversely affect your overall score. If you are aiming for a score above 80, you will need to reflect deeply on the material in each Unit and ‘go the extra mile’ in applying it to your future

anticipated circumstances. This may involve including content in each section that is not included in these instructions (at your own initiative). The key thing is to balance your expectations for this assignment with your time-constraints due to other commitments. Please also note that the content suggested here is far too much to complete in the week before the financial plan is due. This assessment is designed to be written each week as you work through the course material. It is designed to encourage you to think deeply about the concepts covered in each Unit and to apply it to your own life. In some ways it is like a journal. You are supposed to study the content of a Unit, then immediately apply that content to your own life by writing up the relevant sections of your financial plan. Your financial plan should contain the following sections and content:

The title page of your financial plan should clearly identify the following information: Course

FINS5510 Personal Financial Planning, 2021 Summer Term

Name

Your given name and family name as it appears on your student ID card with your family name in bold.

Student number

Your student number (eg 1234567)

Word count

Word count of the main body of your submission (not including references or Appendices). You can obtain this in Microsoft Word by highlighting the entire text of the main body of your assignment and reading the word count from the bottom left of the status bar (at the bottom left of the screen).

The table of contents should be on a separate page to your title page and should include a list of your section headings and the associated page numbers. If you use heading styles correctly in your document, Microsoft Word can automatically insert a table of contents by selecting: References … Table of Contents … then select one of the options

This section is a statement of your current situation. It provides a starting point for assessing the gap between your current situation and the long-term goals that you will establish in section 2 of your financial plan. Also, identifying a client’s current situation is also a key component of a ‘Fact Finder’ and a Statement of Advice (SOA). As such, performing an audit on your own situation is a good experience for undertaking a factfind with a client.

The information is private and confidential and will not be used for research or commercial purposes. For more information in privacy of your information, please refer to the section on ‘Privacy’ on page 7. This section should include the following information:

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Your current age.

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Your preferred gender description.

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Your current relationship status description (eg. single, casual relationship, defacto relationship, married). This is relevant for the estate planning and some other sections of your financial plan.

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A list of anyone who is currently financially dependent on you (usually children).

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Your country of residency or citizenship. If you are an overseas student, please also identify whether you plan to pursue residency in Australia in the future.

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Your current residential living circumstances. Are you living in a residential college or other UNSW accommodation, renting or co-renting a property, own your own home (with or without a mortgage) or living with parents?

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Your current mode of study. Are you a part-time or full-time student? Are you a domestic or international student? What is your degree program and major? When do you expect to complete your current degree?

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Your current employment status. Are you working part-time, full-time or currently not working? What is the name of your employer and what is your current job role?

An income statement estimates your income, expenses and profit over the last 12 months. As discussed in Unit 1 of the course, income statements are always measured over a period of time (often one month or one year). The key formula for an income statement is income less expenses is equal to profit. Following are a few tips: •

You likely haven’t been recording your income and expenses over the last year and so some estimation will be necessary. I obviously don’t know the ‘truth’ of your income and expenses over this period. However, you should do your best to estimate your key expense categories, since they are usually needed for any home loan applications and are useful for establishing a budget.

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It is helpful to express your income, expense and profit figures in both ‘per year’ and ‘per month’ bases (as two separate columns). For some expense categories (such as food), it may be easier to estimate a ‘typical month’ and then multiply by twelve to estimate the annual figure. For other expense categories (such as motor vehicle registration and insurance), it may easier to estimate the total expense for the year and then divide by twelve to estimate the ‘per month’ figure.

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For your personal income (salary or wages), you can use either before or after-tax i...