Lighthouse Financial Services Company — Program funding by authorization state as at 16 October 2026. Use the controls to switch views and to include or exclude money that has not been released.
1. “Budget” Is Not One Number Here
Authorized — a ceiling, and the number most often misused
$27,904,000 is what the Charter permits the program to become, not what it is. Every misuse of this console starts by treating the ceiling as a wallet: dividing spend by it to produce a soothing “percent consumed,” or dividing remaining calendar by it to produce a burn rate the program has no authority to run at. The authorized total changes only by Board decision — it moved once, when Gate 0 approved the 9.0% contingency on top of the base — and a reader who sees it move anywhere else is looking at an error, not a decision.
Released — the only money with a signature on it
$14,232,000 is the sum of the Stage 1 and Stage 2 tranches plus the two minuted contingency draws. It is the answer to a precise question: what has a gate, on the record, allowed? Nothing enters this state without a gate outcome, which is why the console derives it from the tranche table rather than carrying it as its own field — a released figure that could be edited independently of the gates would eventually disagree with them.
Spent — backward-looking, and honest only inside a tranche
$6,950,000 measures the past. Its only legitimate denominator is $14,232,000: spend against released funding is a variance a gate can act on, while spend against the authorized ceiling is theater. The console will show the second number if asked — the toggle exists precisely so a reader can watch how much friendlier the picture becomes when the denominator quietly triples.
Unreleased — authorized money that may never exist
$13,672,000 is the state conventional reporting has no word for, which is why conventional reporting misstates this program. It is not committed, not committed-pending, not forecast: it is money two future boards may decline to release, and one of the five outcomes available to them is CANCEL. Treating it as certain is how organizations acquire projects they cannot stop — the funding equivalent of the asymmetric voting bar the Governance Model exists to prevent.
2. The Console
Toggling Include unreleased funding off rescales the view to what is actually available. The two pictures are very different, and a reader is better served seeing the difference than being told about it.
3. Stage Detail
| Stage | Tranche | Spent | Remaining | Released at | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 — 1 | $2,180,000 | $2,412,000 | $0 | Gate 0 · 05 Feb 2026 | Released |
| Stage 2 — 2 | $11,640,000 | $4,538,000 | $7,102,000 | Gate 1 · 11 Jun 2026 | Released |
| Stage 3 — 3 | $7,450,000 | — | — | Gate 2 · 01 Apr 2027 | Not released |
| Stage 4 — 4 | $4,330,000 | — | — | Gate 3 · 28 Oct 2027 | Not released |
Stage 1 — closed, over tranche, and the model working as designed
The $232,000 overrun is the accounting shadow of the Gate 1 recycle: six retained weeks of pricing, product and distribution-analytics work, an external capital-charge recomputation, channel renegotiation and gate re-preparation. Each of those lines was priced in the Recycle Memorandum before the draw was authorized — the sequence was estimate, authorize, spend, not spend, discover, explain. The test of a funding control is not whether overruns occur; it is whether an overrun can occur silently. This one could not.
Stage 2 — the live tranche, and the only row where “variance” means anything
At week 17 of 40, spend against the Stage 2 tranche is behind a straight-line pace — and the console deliberately refuses to score that as good news. Under-burn decomposes into three indistinguishable stories: work costing less than planned, work happening later than planned, or invoices arriving later than work. Only the first is favorable, and the console cannot tell them apart; the Dashboard carries the milestone evidence needed to separate them. What the console can certify is narrower and still worth having: nothing has been spent that a gate did not release.
Stages 3 and 4 — rows that are deliberately almost empty
Two tranches sit unreleased behind gates that have not convened, and their rows carry dashes where a forecasting instinct wants numbers. That emptiness is a statement, not a gap: publishing spend projections against unreleased tranches would manufacture exactly the commitment the gate structure exists to withhold — the same reasoning under which the Resource-Loaded WBS declines to publish a staffing matrix for stages whose money does not yet exist, and under which no full-program EVM baseline is drawn (Decision D-10).
4. Contingency Reserve
| Item | Amount | Authorized by |
|---|---|---|
| Reserve established at Gate 0 (9.0% of base) | $2,304,000 | Gate Review Board |
| Draw — I-01 Gate 1 recycle loop | −$232,000 | Gate decision, minuted |
| Draw — GC-03 external actuarial peer review | −$180,000 | Gate decision, minuted |
| Remaining reserve | $1,892,000 | Held by the Board, not the Chair (D-09) |
The reserve is the only pool the program can reach without a new tranche, and it is not the Chair's to spend. Both draws to date were authorized at a gate and minuted — the recycle loop and the external actuarial peer review required under GC-03.
Draw 1 — the recycle loop: contingency doing its stated job
The I-01 draw funded rework the base budget could not have contained without dishonesty: a recycle is by definition unplanned, and pre-funding it would have priced failure into the plan. Its composition is itself evidence of restraint — the largest component was simply keeping the core team assembled for six weeks rather than standing it down and re-forming it, which is the cheap version of a recycle. The expensive version, re-mobilization after disbandment, is the cost this draw avoided.
Draw 2 — GC-03: why this is not the peer review already in the base budget
The base non-labor budget carries a planned line for external actuarial peer review and pricing validation — work the program always intended to buy. The GC-03 draw is a different thing: an additional independent review of GLWB rider pricing that exists only because Gate 1 scored financial return at 3 and attached a condition. One is planned assurance, funded in base; the other is a gate's purchased skepticism, funded from reserve. Merging them in the accounts would erase the distinction the gate spent its leverage creating — and would understate, to any future reader, how much the recycle actually cost.
Is the remaining reserve enough?
$1,892,000 remains against two funded stages and two unfunded ones — and that framing is the point. The reserve does not need to survive the whole program; it needs to survive to Gate 2, where the Board can re-examine adequacy with Stage 3's release on the table. A reserve sized to carry all four stages through every surprise would just be base budget wearing a different label, and the 9.0% sizing was set against the funded horizon, not the authorized one. The standing risk is concentration: both open gate conditions sit in front of Gate 2, and a second draw of recycle scale before then would force the adequacy conversation early — which is a feature. A reserve whose depletion triggers a governance conversation is a control; one that absorbs surprises silently is a blindfold.
5. What This Console Cannot Tell You
- Whether the program is on budget. There is no program-level baseline to be on or off — only two of four stages are funded (Decision D-10). Performance is measurable inside a released tranche and nowhere else.
- Whether unreleased funding will ever be released. $13,672,000 is authorized, not committed. Gate 2 and Gate 3 can decline, and one of the five outcomes available to them is CANCEL.
- Whether spending is going well. The Dashboard makes the same point about Stage 2's under-burn: money moving slower than time is ambiguous until you know whether the work is cheaper or simply undone.
- What the product costs the carrier. This is program cost. The Cost-Benefit Analysis covers statutory capital strain, which is a different pool on a different clock and must never be summed with these figures.
Maintained by B. Trombley, Program Finance Manager, under the authority of C. Tyrrell, NPD Program Manager and Chair of the Gate Review Board. Figures derive from the same source as the Program Budget. Related: Program Dashboard · Resource-Loaded WBS · Vendor SOW.