Savings plan

A savings plan is a standing instruction at your broker to buy a fixed amount of a fund or share at a fixed interval, known in German as a Sparplan. Each execution is a separate purchase with its own date, its own price and often its own fractional share count. Nothing about the plan is a single decision after the first one; it is one decision repeated on a calendar.

Why it matters

For measurement this is close to an ideal case. The deposits are regular and dated, none of them was a judgement call about the market, and the resulting history is long enough that a benchmark comparison has something to work with. The cost is administrative: a plan running for five years across three funds produces several hundred purchase lines, and any spreadsheet keeping up with it by hand will be wrong somewhere. This is also the history that makes the difference between a time-weighted and a money-weighted figure easy to see.

How BullBenchmark shows it

Every execution in your export is read as its own purchase with its own date and price, and they roll up into one position with an average cost rather than dozens of rows you have to interpret. Because each of those dates is also a cash flow, the replayed index line follows the same rhythm your plan did. A history assembled from many small purchases is what the live demo shows in its positions table.

Related terms

Cost basis · DRIP (dividend reinvestment) · Time-weighted return (TWR)

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