Projection Assumption Guidelines
Every year, FP Canada and the Institut québécois de planification financière publish their Projection Assumption Guidelines, which are designed to help financial planners make long-term financial projections.
These guidelines include assumptions about the inflation rate, rates of return on major asset classes, borrowing rate, life expectancy, and more.
Snap Projections can import the assumption guidelines for Inflation Rates and default Rates of Return into your projections. You continue to have the option to make adjustments to these values and save your own default settings as shown below. The guidelines released in 2023 are available in Snap Projections.
First, you will need to go to the Scenario Setup -> General page. Then, you can choose to import the guidelines by clicking the Use Guidelines button.
This will update your Inflation Rates and Capital Asset Rates of Return assumptions to the following values.
Fees: Note that the investment management fees paid by clients both for products and advice must be subtracted from these values to obtain the net return. Actual net portfolio returns will depend on the actual product and portfolio management-related fees.
Note that the Show Projections to age value will also update to age 100 after clicking Use Guidelines.
To set these rates as your default for all new projections, please select Defaults and then Save current page settings for new scenarios.
The rate of return for Cash represents a long-term assumption of short-term returns.
The rate of return for Equity is an average of rates of return for Canadian equities, foreign developed market equities, and emerging market equities.
Each year after the guidelines are updated you will need to click the Use Guidelines button to import the new values and then you can save them as your new default using the steps above.