Flexible Retirement Planner Support Forum

If you click on the "Additional Inputs" button, you'll see a section at the bottom of the pop up window where you can enter additional cash flows. Enter the lump sum as a "Taxable savings" cash flow and set the start and end year to be the year that you plan to sell the house. On...

Your plan has a lot of moving parts with difference types of retirement income, but it sounds like you have a pretty good handle on it and as long as you enter all the info correctly, the results should be good. Also, the planner does have an option to include RMDs. You can enable it by clicking the...

I also receive a lifetime award for workers comp, non-taxable, no cola, $20,800/year, I think this can be entered as "Income (no cola)" starting at start of plan and ending at end of plan. and I also receive a disability pension from new york state in the amount of $34,000/year with a col...

OK, your situation sounds a bit complicated, but I'll take a crack at it. The key with this is to enter each thing carefully, then check the values for each year in the "Detailed View" tab of the planner after you run it. You want to convince yourself that the planner is handling your inco...

If the current $26k payment is indexed to inflation, then that's all you need to enter. If your payment will be reset once you hit 65, then you'll need to figure out how much that future payment amount will be worth in today's dollars and enter it in the "additional inputs" section, starti...

Hi Marc, Thanks for the question. The "Additional Inputs" feature of the planner is probably your best bet for handling the special cases you mentioned. On the main page of the planner where it asks for "Retirement Spending," enter the base expense level that you expect to stay c...

Thanks for the kind words about the planner. I'm glad you're finding it helpful. In terms of how the simulation handles years, it's more precise to think of a year as "the 'next 12 months." That would probably be less confusing if I hadn't included references to the calendar year in some o...

As it happens, "Portfolio value at retirement start" is the value at the end of the year in which you retire. I can see how this is confusing. You could call this a bug, but I think of it more as a quirk :) (btw, I'm also retired, so I see this quirk in my own results, but since I wrote th...

i'm curious about the choice of values for inflation, investment return, taxes, etc. clearly with a model like this one would test multiple combinations, but as a starting point do most go with long term historical values such as 3% for inflation, 12% SD for the SP500, and so on? I like your approa...

Sorry, but there isn't a direct way to specify an ending portfolio value. A workaround is to use the "additional inputs" to create a one-time expense in the last year of the plan for the amount you want. This will cause the simulation to try to withdraw that amount in the last year and if ...