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Knowing where you stand today is the first step toward reaching your financial goals in the future. The hell of it is pulling together all the separate strands of your financial life. I don't mean just stock and mutual-fund holdings or 401(k) plan balances, but all of it -- mortgage and credit-card debts, the value of stock options, life insurance coverage, not to mention the tax basis of your assets. It gets to be an overwhelming chore in a hurry. Someday, someone will earn a ton of dough making all that calculating a snap. In the meantime, if you can bring yourself to type in some of your particulars, there's a new software program for analyzing your financial situation that deserves attention. The program, Navigator Plus, is offered free by mutual-fund giant Vanguard Group. You can download it from Vanguard's Web site to your PC (Macintosh users are out of luck) or wait until early next year when it will become one of the site's interactive features (Mac users in luck then). After testing the program for a couple of weeks, I'm very impressed. Its highest achievement is the way it integrates four principal areas of personal financial analysis: college savings, retirement saving, taxable investing, and estate planning. Each bears on the others and, unlike many earlier planning tools at sites elsewhere on the Web or included in packaged software, this program recognizes that reality. Navigator Plus presumes that few people have the time or patience to enter in one sitting all of their pertinent financial data. So it offers users a fully flexible choice between operating the full-blown program or a "Quick Path," which speeds you toward rougher estimates. I say fully flexible because at any point along the analytical trail that you want to drill down to enter more detail, you can do so and then return to the Quick Path. A key feature many users will find themselves returning to is a "What If" function, which allows you to change a series of key assumptions to see how they would change a scenario. For instance, in an analysis of college savings, you can alter the rates of return you expect on your investments, the rate of annual increase you expect in college costs, how much you expect to save a year, and other variables. But watch out: In the retirement section, you might get a chill when you move your cursor over the assumptions about who lives to get the life insurance proceeds. Believe me, I sure paused before clicking the button labeled "Robert dies today." Assumptions underlying the program's analyses are easy to find. Neat graphs and printable tables are all over the place, plus there are many helpful educational asides. In estate planning, for example, I found lots to learn from one called "The Significance Of Who Dies First." There's also an extensive glossary that defined terms I didn't know that I didn't know, such as: "Bargain Element -- In stock options, the difference between the exercise price and the fair-market value of the stock at the time of exercise." Navigator Plus isn't perfect. In several spots, such as the pages that describe the elements of a chart, I found myself squinting at tiny type. The glossary can be slow to appear on the screen, and the time it took to calculate some "What If" scenarios lasted long enough to start me wondering whether my computer had crashed. One afternoon, while clicking on a button that promised to lead me to a lesson on the probate process, my screen did indeed freeze. I had to quit the program before I was able to save lots of data I had laboriously entered. Arrgh! Most notably, though, when it comes to suggesting how to put in effect any investment plan the program comes up with, Navigator Plus presents a range of Vanguard funds suitable to the task. That's only to be expected, but you should keep in mind that other alternatives exist beyond Vanguard. To its credit, Vanguard does offer a choice between using only its specialty -- index funds -- or a mix of index and actively managed Vanguard funds. To download the current, desktop version, go to http://www.vanguard.com/planningcenter/software/navplus.html. It will work with most recent Windows-based PCs (Pentium processor, 100 megahertz or faster, at least 24 megabytes of available random-access memory and a hard-disk drive with at least 35 megabytes of free space). My 56k modem downloaded the file as advertised within 45 minutes, but Vanguard warns that a 14.4k modem could take as long as three hours to do the job. Once the file reached my desktop, I was able to install it swiftly and without a hitch. If you give Navigator Plus a try, let me know how it goes. (My E-mail address is RBarkerBW@aol.com.) Ditto if you know of a comparable product that you think performs better. With Navigator Plus, though, I predict you'll be surprised at its depth and helpfulness.
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