Floating start and end years

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trfrp
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2016 9:32 pm

Floating start and end years

Post by trfrp »

I have added an "additional input" to cover five years of long-term care expenses. The issue that I have with the setup is that I have to associate this entry with specific ages, which means I have to modify them if I fiddle with the life expectancy. Moreover, having an entry that is tied to a specific age late in life prevents you from running a sensitivity analysis on life expectancy. For example, I have life expectancy set to 95 years and long-term care costs for my wife and I set to $120,000 per year for the last five years of the simulation (ages 91-95). This prevents me from setting life expectancy any lower than 91 years, which means I can't run a sensitivity analysis on life expectancy that would use any age less than 91. Effectively, if I want to simulate a life expectancy of 85 years, I need to manually edit the additional entry for long-term care costs to run from years 81-85.

What I would really love is to be able to set the start year for the long-term care costs to "End of Plan-4" and leave the end year set equal to "End of Plan". That way, no matter what life expectancy I use, I will have long-term care costs in the last five years of the simulation. Since long-term care costs most frequently are followed by death, this seems like a logical approach to me. I note that you already have a setting for "Retirement Year-1". My suggestion would be that either the start year or the end year of an additional input could be set to any of the following:

* A specific age
* "Start of Plan" with an optional positive offset
* "Retirement Year" with an optional positive or negative offset
* "End of Plan" with an optional negative offset

What do you think?
jimr
Posts: 821
Joined: Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:48 pm

Re: Floating start and end years

Post by jimr »

It's a good suggestion.

I'm not sure when I'll get to it, but I made a note to investigate adding your suggestion next time I'm in that part of the code.

Thanks,

Jim
trfrp
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2016 9:32 pm

Re: Floating start and end years

Post by trfrp »

Thanks, Jim. I think this would open up a lot of possibilities for income and expense flows that key off either retirement or death dates.
trfrp
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2016 9:32 pm

Re: Floating start and end years

Post by trfrp »

Jim, I was excited to see that you added "Retirement Year" with an optional positive or negative offset in the latest version of the software. Any chance that we could have "End of Plan" with an optional negative offset? As noted, this is really necessary to be able to run sensitivity analyses based on life expectancy in plans with expenses that are tied to years near the end of the plan. Otherwise, the simulation crashes if your death year is less than any of the dates in your additional inputs. Thanks.
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