Floating start and end years
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2016 10:41 pm
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?
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?