Why does portfolio go to zero when flex floor is 0%

[ajenny413]

I set up a 100% S&P stock portfolio. I set the "minimum percent to fund" of the flexible spending policy to zero. I chose the flexible spending policy for my simulation run. Since I was indicating willingness to take nothing from my portfolio during bad years, I expected never to run out of money in the portfolio. I saw a reduction in portfolio failures, but some still showed up. Is this the expected outcome? And if so, why?

This is not an academic question. I was thinking about setting up a reverse mortgage to get me through bad years without selling stock when the equity values were low.

[jimr]

I suspect the issue is that the spending policy algorithm isn't reducing spending fast enough to keep the portfolio from running out of money. Try increasing the spending policy multiplier, which increases the rate at which spending reductions are made. With the multiplier set to one, in any given year the biggest spending reduction is the inflation rate (eg 3%). Setting the multiplier to 2 will increase that to double the inflation rate, setting it to 4 increases the maximum reduction per year to 4 times the inflation rate.