New Retirement Calculator in Personal Capital

[dadu007]

It uses 5000 Monte Carlo simulations....
Anybody have any initial feedback or impressions about it?
For me, the 10th percentile says I'll run out of money by the time I'm 84.
Worth looking at, at the very least.

 

[nash031]

I played with it. Quicker than FIREcalc, but way less detailed. Useful for quick comparisons. I like that it will use actual spending data imported directly from the app, so I can get a quick and dirty update. I just wouldn't hang my hat on it...

 

[Car-Guy]

Personally, I wouldn't hang my hat on any of the on-line retirement calculators. The Personal Capital calculator seems to be pretty basic and seems to give you an idea but is no where near detailed enough unless you just want a "directional ballpark number" (probably + or - a lot). I used a lot of the on-line calculators before I retired and they helped me to develop my own custom spreadsheet which I feel very comfortable with and that I still use today. I occosionally still play with FireCal since I found it to be the best on-line calculator by far but I depend on my custom spreadsheet for the most part.

 

[photoguy]

I think there are two important points to make about MC calculators:

(1) They are largely useless (and dangerous to use) unless you understand how they actually perform the simulation and the assumptions behind it.

(2) They are better used to compare two different withdrawal strategies (under a paired simulation) than to pull out absolute probabilities (i.e. withdrawal method X yields success percentage Y%).