What about adding an option to go "back to work"?

[frp user]

Hi,

Great online calculator – one of the nicest I’ve seen. Thanks.

I have been poking at a question about early-early retirement. What if one modeled an optional “unretire” option as part of the simulation? Not just lower withdrawals or no COLA but a “back to work for 5 years” option. Maybe trigger being portfolio bumping down to 70% or lower inflation-adjusted any year during the first 10 years of retirement. My guess is that for a given withdrawal rate that otherwise might be marginal, this plan would result in way lower failure rate because it would give a portfolio time to “recharge” in the event of a bear market in early years of retirement. And it matches what a person might actually do in the real world in this situation. Thoughts?

Anyway, thanks for a great, educational tool.
--Bill

[admin]

This is really interesting to me. What would you think about another option in the "Withdrawal Policy" drop down like "Flexible-BTW" (for back-to-work). I'd add the ability to configure the back-to-work parameters in the policy config pop-up. I think they would be "Portfolio Value Trigger" (default 70%), "Back-to-work duration" (default 5 yrs), and "back-to-work max age" (default: retirement age+10).

It might take me a little bit to get to it, but it shouldn't be that much work. As far as open sourcing the project, I'd definitely consider that. I make enough off the google ads on the site to pay for hosting and some adwords to let people know about the site, but that's about it. I'm definitely not trying to earn a living off it.

[admin]

Hi Bill,

Given the New England weather this week, I decided it would be a good day to add the back-to-work feature you had suggested a while ago. A new version of the planner is up on the site.

The change to the simulation code was really simple, just a handful of lines of code. Getting the GUI hooked in was a bit more work, but it went in just fine.

I decided to leave the spending policies as-is and add the controls for this feature to the "Spending Policy Config" pop up window. It might be a bit confusing, but they're at least related and it was better than redoing the layout on the main panel.

Let me know what you think, especially if you see anything that doesn't look right.

Jim