A St. Albert-based financial planning firm has launched a free online tool meant to give Canadians who don’t typically use professional advisors access to a basic financial plan.
FP Advisors, which operates offices in St. Albert and Edmonton, released the program called PlanDIY in late September, just ahead of Financial Planning Month, which was designated by the Financial Planning Association in 2002 to encourage people to organize their finances before the holiday season and the new year.
The three-person firm offers personal financial planning services for individuals, families and businesses, including retirement, estate, corporate planning and executor advising. It was co-founded by Dave Faulkner, along with his son Cory Faulkner, a certified financial planner.
Software Roots Go Back Decades
The software behind PlanDIY has a long history. Dave wrote a program in the 1990s that Cory said helped lay the groundwork for the broader financial planning software industry. After Cory joined his father in the early 2000s, the pair built Razor Plan, a planning software later sold and still widely used by financial advisors today.
It was through developing software for professional advisors that Cory and Dave said they recognized an opportunity to serve ordinary Canadians directly. Cory said many people don’t get access to a financial advisor because they don’t fit the typical client profile, and the firm realized its existing software could be adapted to help.
Closing What the Firm Calls the ‘Advice Gap’
Cory and Dave describe a disconnect they call Canada’s financial planning “advice gap,” in which Canadians across different income levels avoid seeking professional advice for different reasons. According to the pair, people with low to moderate incomes may be unable or unwilling to pay for advice, while wealthier Canadians may distrust advisors and their firms.
To address this, the original software — built for professional advisors — had to be redesigned for general users. Cory said the team changed how it operates and created a more user-friendly experience so people without specialized financial knowledge could use it, and decided to offer it for free.
PlanDIY asks users to complete a brief questionnaire about their finances without requesting banking details or other personal financial information. Instead, it focuses on the types of accounts a user holds and the amounts in each. The program then evaluates four areas — retirement, savings and investments, debt management, and security and risk — before recommending five action items.
Cory said the tool can offer specific recommendations because it gathers both qualitative and quantitative information, even without identifying the user personally.
Not Meant to Cover Every Case
Cory said PlanDIY is not intended to be a universal solution and will not address every financial situation. He said the firm’s approach is to build software that works for the majority of cases rather than trying to account for every outlier, which he said would make the system too large and unusable. He said the goal was to achieve roughly 80 per cent coverage of situations, which he believes benefits most users.
PlanDIY officially launched in late September and is available at plandiy.ca.
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