Suggestion- Bucket Strategy

[dshaneh]

Wow I love this tool, so flexible and powerful! One suggestion I didnt find when I searched- Can a feature be set up for a bucket strategy portfolio approach at retirement? Heres the thinking- At the year of retirement, create the flex to break the portfolio into 3 buckets with separate $s and returns-

Bucket 1 -Cash assets

Bucket 2- Stable assets like div stocks or bonds

Bucket 3-growth portfolio, this would hold whats left after you subtract Portfolio - Bucket 1 - Bucket 2, and correlate with your current portfolio parameters.

The advantage is that you can set your buckets to match your planning....so you could keep the same amount (say $500k, or 5 years of withdrawals) in bucket 1 and 2, and then unlock your actual growth portfolio to grow more aggressively with the rest of the funds.

Ideally each bucket woudl have flex $ amount (or at an annual withdrawal rate multiple), return, and deviation. But a simpler version is aslo an improvement- say perhaps assume that the buckets are equally spread across the entire portfolios tax categories, each is just a fixed $ size setting, a zero deviation for buckets 1 and 2 given low risk, etc.

And i realize you could just assume a say 40-60 split bond stock to simulate a generic bucket approach, but the problem becomes that if your portfolio changes drastically that the % allocation automatically over-under fills your first two buckets, giving you a skewed assessmsent or your planning.

Anyway thats my two cents- thanks again and good luck!

[jimr]

Thanks for the kind words and for detailing out the buckets suggestion.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be something I'll get done because of how major a change it'd be to the core simulation code and how reluctant I am to muck with that code at this stage in its lifecycle. That core code is nearly 20 years old and I'd be too worried I'd introduce new bugs if I mess with it.