Dory - any interest in another 'little' Mod?..................

[samclem]

dory36,
Thanks a lot for adding the ESRBob 4%/95% feature. It is very useful.
- I found the "old" method (% of starting portfolio adjusted for annual inflation) useful when I was considering ER/ESR. It gave me the big picture: At a nest egg of $XXX I'd be able to quit and build myself an inflation adjusted income stream of $XXX per month. That was the critical question then.
- Now that I'm "semi-retired" the option of modeling variable withdrawals based on portfolio value is of greater use to me.


Since everyone gets to "pile on" requests, here's' mine: Would it be possible to characterize in some way the withdrawals taken under the ESRBob method? It would be handy to know if the purchasing power of the annual withdrawals decreased over time (the best indication that the withdrawal % is too big), and some indication of variabilty of the amounts over the time window considered (e.g maybe how many times the annual withdrawals hit the 95% (or other) "safety stop," or some expression of the standard deviation of the returns, etc)

If it's impractical todo this, any suggested "user work arounds" to get the same info would be appreciated
P.S. This suggestion is really for a function that is "above and beyond" as the program is super as-is.

 

[dory36]

Would it be possible to characterize in some way the withdrawals taken under the ESRBob method?  It would be handy to know if the purchasing power of the annual withdrawals decreased over time (the best indication that the withdrawal % is too big), and some indication of variabilty of the amounts over the time window considered (e.g maybe how many times the annual withdrawals hit the 95% (or other) "safety stop,"  or some expression of the standard deviation of the returns, etc)

  If it's impractical todo this, any suggested "user work arounds" to get the same info would be appreciated

I see the question, and I think the results would be easy to collect, but I have not quite figured out how to report the results.

My first impression is that the important part of this question is already answered. The chart on the left shows what sort of income, in today's dollars, you'd be living on in the final year of your plan.

While this doesn't show the variability from year to year during the ~30 years, the problem with a retirement cycle generally depletes it enough that it never quite (or at all) recovers. There are not normal situations where a sequence would have you eating cat food 15 years into retirement, then caviar a few years later. So I suspect that if the ending years are good, so are the intervening years.

In the default settings, but using the 95% rule, the 1950s look pretty lame compared with the other years -- and all of these would have been impacted by the Great Depression. Retirements well established before then, and those starting right after then, all seemed to end up in pretty good shape.

If the internal data is really of interest, I can perhaps generate a text file with the yearly withdrawals, the next time I am writing code to extract data. But I'd need a set of starting conditions to make that useful -- so use the bug report link and check the include data box if you want me to try to get the data.

dory36