Flexible Retirement Planner Support Forum

Do you suggest updating portfolio amount, income & expenses throughout the year & re-run report? Or, only once a year when my age changes?

Assume date of birth January 1st.

The reason for my question is that if calculations are keyed off retirement age & on an annual basis - if for example, I update portfolio value this month, October & 'Run' FRP, it seems to me (?) that the Success Chance will be will be based on the updated portfolio value ... not taking into account that 9 months (Jan-Sept) of expenses have already been accounted for, in the Success calculation ran in January. Does my question make sense?

I'm not in the financial advising business, so I can't really say what exactly you should do.

What I usually do personally is to check things out at the start of each new year. That's basically good enough for me unless some change comes up mid year that I want to explore (say like a bad market crash or something).

In general, my personal opinion is that any differences in the planner's output between the start of the year and 9 months later are sort of within the margin of error of the Monte Carlo approach and when I'm working with my own plan, I'm not too concerned about these sorts of timing issues.

You could do some sensitivity analysis on this by doing a few runs with life expectancy varying between your default value minus 1 and your default plus one (eg if you set it to 95, try out 94, 95, 96). This will let you see how much of a difference adding or removing 12 months from your plan might matter. (you can also do this automatically using the planner's sensitivity analysis feature (maybe try life expectancy between 90 and 105).

I know we all usually like to set thresholds for ourselves with this stuff (like prob must be 90 or 95% or greater), but really, a couple of points difference in a plan's probability of success isn't all that meaningful because of all the built-in uncertainty in the overall plan.