Spouse retirement plan and different age

[jalan]

How do I use additional inputs for my spouse who has separate retirement accounts (Roth and 401k)? We will begin withdrawing at a different time given her younger age. Is there a way of inputting the current balance and annual savings for her separate account?
Thanks!

[jimr]

Sorry, but retirement accounts can't be broken out separately in this planner. The easiest way to handle this is to just enter the total combined balances for both spouse for each retirement account type (eg taxable, tax deferred, tax free).

You can break out income amounts for each spouse separately in additional inputs. The trick here is to key everything off of one spouse's age (usually older spouse). So if the older spouse is 2 years older than the younger spouse and the younger spouse will start social security at age 67, enter the younger spouse's social security in additional inputs with a start age of 69 (age of older spouse when younger spouse starts receiving ss). You can use the memo field to show what each cash flow is for.

[jalan]

Can you clarify “break out income amounts for each?”
I am trying to figure out how I can model the later onset of withdrawals from retirement accounts for younger spouse.

[jimr]

First, the limitation is that you can't specify which spouse's retirement funds get used at any time. All funds are treated as pooled and any withdrawals needed come from the pooled funds. Although this isn't how things work in reality, in most cases it's an ok simplification. Unfortunately, if you need to model the specific dynamics of how withdrawals happen in each spouse's retirement accounts separately, this tool is not going to be helpful for that.

Once retirement starts, the planner automatically determines how much withdrawal is needed each year based on the difference between total after tax income and expenses.

For "break out income amounts for each" I mean that you can use multiple entries in additional inputs to enter income sources for each spouse separately. Often spouses have different sources of income that start in different plan years (eg pensions, social security, maybe part time jobs). That's why people usually need to enter the income for each spouse separately with multiple additional inputs entries rather than combining it to put into the Retirement Income field on the main planner input page.

[redderhead]

To keep things inside the model but still allow for your partner's separate income, fund accounts, social security events, withdrawals, etc. you can also use separate scenarios (top right drop down menu labeled "Scenarios:").

Each scenario is a complete, separate data set.

Mine are labeled My Complete Portfolio and Partner Complete Portfolio.

The scenarios are completely separate but for any individual future year range, for any variable set, run both scenarios and then add the duplicate variable values together for you and your partner. This provides the summed result for your partnership and allows all the model's features to act independently yet easily available, albeit in different scenarios.

They're only a drop down menu choice away.

All the best,
Red Head

[jimr]

That's a great suggestion Red Head. Thx for chiming in with it. - Jim

[BigEd]

Jim,

Just saw this. N.M. my post, thanks.
BigEd