Personal financial planning based on fuzzy multiple objective programming

Personal financial planning involves managing all the money activities during a planner’s lifetime. Traditional personal financial planning procedures begin with the planner’s financial status, goals, and expectations for the future before future cash flows of different time periods under various scenarios can be determined. If the planning results fail to meet the planner’s expectation, the planner adjusts tunable parameters repeatedly until an acceptable financial arrangement can be obtained. Such a ‘‘trial-and-error approach’’ or ‘‘what-if analysis’’ does not promise to achieve the optimal plan while numerous outcomes burden the planner. Multiple objectives with different goals of different importance levels might be involved in this decision-making problem. Since the objectives tend to conflict with each other, this study proposes to solve the problem based on a decision model that incorporates a fuzzy multiple objective programming method to achieve better solutions than using ‘‘trial-and-error’’. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.