Flexible Retirement Planner Support Forum

For most people, the best approach is to enter the AVERAGE tax rate (combining federal and state) that you expect to pay in retirement. The planner's tax model is very crude and doesn't understand deductions or other special tax situations. It leaves it to you to figure all that out based on your ci...

What you've described makes sense, but again, it's key to carefully check everything in the year-by-year detailed view. One potential gotcha is that if expenses are greater than income in any years before you hit age 60 and the program needs to pull money out of the tax deferred portfolio to cover t...

Thanks for posting your experience with this. It's a bummer that the themes don't properly remap the colors that the program uses. It seems like they should maintain the relative luminosity of each color through the remap, but maybe I don't understand how the themes work. At least folks having this ...

During the accumulation phase before retirement, the program doesn't track income vs. expenses at all, so the only way to get new money into your portfolios is to use the savings cash flows. Once retirement starts, the program covers annual expenses first by using any income available. If after tax ...

Overall, the accuracy of the simulation's approach to taxes is dependent on the numbers you plug in for rates and the exact details of your tax circumstances. My feeling is that this approach gives users the control to "dial in" numbers that make the most sense for them. IMO, there's really no other...

You're on the right track. The only issue is that the negative tax-deferred savings is sort of a hack that bypasses the FRP taxation logic. So your negative savings amount actually is a tax free withdrawal. The way to handle this is to be sure to account for the taxes that will be due on the withdra...

The way the model works, income taxes are calculated and paid within the same year. This is relatively accurate compared to real life because the IRS requires us to make estimated tax payments (either manually or through our employer) to cover taxes that will be due once the year's tax return is com...

Glad to hear it worked out and thanks for documenting what you've learned here so maybe others can learn too.

Best,

Jim

Based on what you've described, that seems about right to me. Good luck! - Jim

The best way to model this in the planner will depend on the exact details of the situation. In general, the most straightforward way to handle an inheritance is to create a one-time additional inputs "Savings" cash flow into the appropriate portfolio type (eg taxable, tax deferred, tax free) with t...