Show failures line

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bigfoot
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 11:53 am

Show failures line

Post by bigfoot »

The "Show failures" line is still a bit confusing, even after reading your reply in the Q&A forum about this. When I look at it, it looks like the plan is a complete failure when the failures line approaches the "Show percent expenses funded" line. Also, the failures line is higher for a year when the "Probability of Success" is higher than another year when success is lower? Have you addressed this issue somewhere else in your forums?
jimr
Posts: 821
Joined: Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:48 pm

Re: Show failures line

Post by jimr »

bigfoot wrote:The "Show failures" line is still a bit confusing, even after reading your reply in the Q&A forum about this. When I look at it, it looks like the plan is a complete failure when the failures line approaches the "Show percent expenses funded" line.
Yeah, I think this is still a point of confusion, so let me try again. The "Show Failures" graph is simply a graph of the number of times (over the 10,000 simulation runs) that the plan ran out of money in each year. The numbers used for that graph are shown in the last column of the table on the "Detailed View" tab.

The "y scale" for the graph is arbitrary. I manipulate the graph so the biggest "failure" count in the series plots at the top of the graph. Because there are so many plots overlaid onto the same graph, it's not really possible to accurately label the y axis.

As an example, say the highest value for "failure count" occurred at age 88. The failure count would be shown in the last column of the table in the Detailed View for the row corresponding to age 88. Let's say it had a value of 66. That means that out of the 10,000 simulation runs, there were 66 times that the plan ran out of money at age 88. In this example, the "failures line" in the graph will show its highest value at age 88.
Also, the failures line is higher for a year when the "Probability of Success" is higher than another year when success is lower? Have you addressed this issue somewhere else in your forums?
The failure count for any year is a point value, representing the number of sim iterations (out of 10k) that ran out of money in that exact year. The probability of success shown in the table for each year represents a cumulative probability, calculated by counting all the failures that have occurred up to and including that year.

Jim
markey
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2016 10:46 pm

Re: Show failures line

Post by markey »

This is helpful. Please add this clarification to your FAQ answer for "There’s no Y-axis label for the Show Failures line that appears on the graph. How can I tell what this means?" It might also help to say "the scale of the Failures line runs from zero to the maximum number of failures in any one year, a number which might represent only a small percentage of income/expense simulations."

Thanks for this software.
jimr
Posts: 821
Joined: Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:48 pm

Re: Show failures line

Post by jimr »

Thanks for the suggestion. I reworded that section of the FAQ to include part of my response above, along with your suggestion about the y-axis scale.
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