Currency
When you enter values into any money field, please don’t include a dollar sign, commas or cents. Just use whole numbers. The fields have been formatted to display the currency correct.
The only exception here is in the money fields in the Age, Life and Cost of Replacement Table. In this table we have allowed for free text so you can put anything in there. So if you want to have a dollar value with commas and the $ sign in this table, you will need to include them.
Inflation
All currency values in this LTMP are at today's values except for the explicitly inflation-adjusted funding table.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
None of us knows what the rate of inflation (or the value of the dollar, or the price of oil) will be next year, let alone in 10 years time? It would only be a guess.
If we were going to try and use future values, we would also have to add something to the price contractors will charge in the future. This is already very difficult especially when we try to put a cost on a big job like a re-roof or a full building repaint. We could already be out by tens of thousands of dollars.
So taking that into consideration, it is likely that any inflation over the next few years will be less than the margin of error on any job where we are estimating the cost. What you would be doing is tweaking a guess with another guess.
This is especially not necessary when you have the chance to update all of your estimates each year as new information comes to hand. It’s also worth noting that right now the most important values are those related to the current year and these are likely to be very accurate.
We believe that by trying to factor in a value for inflation, it would only create more work and make it more confusing for owners, without genuinely adding any accuracy or certainty.
What values to include
As an example, we recommend that if you have a job such as a building wash that is scheduled for each year, and it cost $1500 this year, just put in $1500 each year. Then also use today’s values for the contribution required each year to maintain the plan. If the contractor puts his price up to $1,600 next year you can tweak the job cost then for the rest of the plan. But otherwise just leave it the same.
It's up to you
On the other hand if you want to make provision for inflation, it’s your choice. Just add a bit to everything each year.
It’s just that we haven’t included any inflation field you need to maintain or edit because we don’t see the value in trying to be that precise.
If you have any feedback or questions please use the feedback form.
The Plan Heaven team.
Disclaimer. Plan Heaven is not qualified in law and any comments made on this website are only the opinion of Plan Heaven and should not be regarded as legal advice. Our comments are merely providing some thoughts on how the legislation might be interpreted and how we go about attempting to meet its requirements. You should not rely on this information in isolation and do you own homework and at all times if you wish to be sure of your position relating to legal matters you should seek advice from a suitably qualified lawyer.