Error: Retirement Age Less than Current Age

[beach58]

I recently updated FRP from 04.04.01 to 04.04.02 and was surprised to see the subject error message.

Why does FRP treat as an error a retirement age that is less then the current age? I imagine there are many retired FRP users in this situation. Thank you.

I've set my retirement age equal to my current age as a work-around, but why?

[jimr]

I can understand that it might be better to be able to show your actual retirement age with that input. However, the simulation doesn't know about years that have already passed and that's why it's saying the retirement age can't be less than current age.

The technical reason this check was added is that the simulation needs to have a "retirement year" set up to track things like portfolio value at retirement, etc. Prior versions of the planner used to silently adjust the retirement year to the start of plan in cases where the retirement year was less than the start of plan.

However, someone pointed out that this behind the scenes "magic" resulted in cash flows using "retirement year" or "retirement year + x" as their start or end year ending up with confusing/surprising start and end years.

Since I didn't want to mess with the internal simulation logic, it seemed safer to just make the check explicit so there's no need for any behind the scenes magic.