Retirement Spending

[lbwiener]

First off.......I love this program. Seriously it is the best and has helped our family greatly. So, thank you!

Regarding the number you should use for your retirement spending..............should this input value include only living expenses or also include all you taxes?

Not sure how the program handles living expenses and taxes and are the separate or not.

thanks.

Look forward to hearing from you soon.



Laurence B. Wiener, MD

[jimr]

Usually, people set up their living expenses to include everything except income taxes, then they make guestimates of their expected income and investment tax rates and have the planner handle the taxes.

The planner's estimates for taxes are very course and don't take into account any of the intricacies of the tax code. The tax rates that you enter are used as average tax rates, with no allowances for deductions or other special circumstances. Also, it's important to add in any state or local income taxes to the rates you set.

If you'd prefer, you can set the tax rates to zero and manually estimate taxes yourself, then include them in your expenses.

Also, after you run the planner, you can get more information about taxes paid from year to year from the the detailed view tab. To see this, while in the detailed view tab click the "show more detail" radio button on the top right of the window. Next, right-mouse on any column header and select "show all columns" to unhide all the possible columns.