Recent Changes to Your Best Life Assumptions [Updates and Releases]

Your Best Life - Recent changes to Your Best Life Assumptions 1/2/2023

At Lumiant, we continuously review our Best Life engine to ensure it aligns with the evolving market conditions and regulations. As such, over the last few weeks we have made some important modifications to our Best Life model.

Earlier, our model relied on the most distant forecast value for inflation, which was suitable when inflation was stable. However, given the current volatile inflation, this approach became inadequate given that those forecast inflation figures can quickly diverge from the monetary policy.

Hence, we have adjusted our model to take into account both the forecasts and an overall 20-year average of inflation for each market. This helps us to derive a more accurate representation of the long-term inflation expectations, instead of just reflecting the current inflation trend.

For instance, in Australia, the monetary policy targets to keep inflation within 2-3%. Currently, it stands at 7.8%, which is significantly higher than the target range. But, by incorporating a 20-year average of inflation along with the current forecast, we reach an overall forecast inflation rate of 2.65% - a value that is more in line with the monetary policy and inflation expectations over the long period.

In addition to inflation, we’ve updated our model to include a few of the regulatory changes we’ve seen in market. These include:

• Increases to pension that were introduced on 20th September 2022 in Australia
• Inclusion of the increase to the Superannuation Guarantee. The model will shortly take into consideration the expected increases to 12% in 2025.

We will continue to update our Best Life engine in line with market and regulatory conditions and as such this may impact Your Best Life scores. We will be sure to keep you updated whenever the engine is updated so you can explain the changes in score to your clients. 

However, should you ever be unsure, feel free to reach out to your Customer Success representative who will be more than happy to help.