Flexible Retirement Planner Support Forum

The short answer is that yes, as long as the standard deviation is high enough, the randomly selected return will almost certainly be negative in some years of some simulation paths. In the example you cited, I'd guess the simulation would draw negative returns thousands of times during a single run...

These questions fall more under "financial planning advice" than "program technical support" and since I'm not a financial planner or a tax professional, nothing I post should be considered financial planning or tax advice. That said, this topic has links to some potentially helpful external resourc...

Also, not sure if you're aware of this, but the simulation taxes all portfolio gains in the year they are earned (eg the taxable portfolio is carried at a 100% cost basis).

Could that account for the discrepancy you're seeing?

You can correspond by email at info@flexibleretirementplanner.com

Also, are you using the latest version of the program (version 04.03.03 Built on 7/10/2020)?

You can get the version by clicking the Help->Release Notes menu option at the top of the main window.

I guess there is some stuff in additional inputs, so I'll need more pages from the report to reproduce what you're seeing.

Actually, it sounds like something different must be going on in your case then. The issue I was talking about would only occur if you actually did originally type in 3.53%. Since you didn't do that, this isn't the issue and I can't explain the numbers you're seeing. Do you have anything configured ...

I think you may have found a kind of weird bug. By any chance could you have originally entered 3.53% for the return instead of 3.5%? If you did, this would explain what you're seeing. If the return is 3.53%, then $257,923 x (1+.0353) / 1.02 = $261,792 The reason this is confusing (and technically a...

Yes. That's in settings. Look for minimum and maximum percent of expenses to fund under Spending Policy Parameters.

It's actually very tough to accomplish what you'd like to do using a probabilistic model. This is because the ending portfolio value shown is a median value, or 50th percentile value. It's determined by taking the ending portfolio values from all 10,000 simulation iterations or paths, sorting them, ...