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Hi, I'm the guy that created the Flexible Retirement Planner and I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience with it. I'd be happy to work with you by PM or email to get to the bottom of what was going on with those inputs. The Flexible Retirement planner was created around 6 years ago and...

Re: Guyton withdrawal decision rules A while back I created a Monte Carlo based retirement planner that implements withdrawal decision rules similar to Guyton's. It's available online for free at: http://www.flexibleRetirementPlanner.com I tried to document everything and have built up a...

FYI, there's a free online Monte Carlo calculator at www.flexibleRetirementPlanner.com that roughly implements the Guyton decision rules. FRP Guy

Thanks for trying out the planner and for the feedback. More comments inline... That's basically correct. However, since the simulation is run 10,000 times, the median withdrawal is the amount such that half of the trials had a lower number and half had a higher number for the given year...

As an avid supporter of FIRECalc, and as the developer of the flexibleRetirementPlanner, I firmly believe that as of today, the best planners are in fact free. As for my motives, the flexibleRetirementPlanner was developed out of intellectual curiosity after I read the work by Guyton on the...

Tadpole, Thanks for the help on this. You're 2 for 2. 1) It turned out that I inadvertently set my development tool (JBuilder) to require version 1.5 of the Java VM. The bad news is that all of my testing is with 1.5, so before this update it wouldn't work with an old version, now it might...

OK, last post... I wanted to remind people that there's an email address on the planner web site if they want to contact me with questions or comments about the planner. I love answering questions here, but I'm sensitive to the fact that I'm using dory36's board to sort of hawk a competing...

On a related note, I posted a bunch new stuff to the web site including a much expanded FAQ and documentation section, a page with some "safe withdrawal rate" research links (you folks have probably read them all), and snippets of source code from the planner (gulp!). The idea on the source...

M Hoffman, Thanks for the detailed questions. These are a great help in making the planner better... Maybe what I should have said was that all values are entered and displayed in 2006 dollars. That means that in the output tab, I'm discounting all the amounts back to 2006 before displaying...

Not dumb at all. In the research, this is one of the things they talk about as a constraint on how fancy you can make the so called "decision rule". I think the decision rule that's used in the FRP could easily be used by a retiree or their financial planner. In any year where your portfolio...

Yes, the report and graph shows the median value, so you can't see the handful of really bad trials where you cut expenses by 50% and still ran out of money. Also, for more detailed data than just a range, make sure you click the Detailed Output tab and look at the year-by-year data (that's the...

If you don't mind entering it manually, you can do this already. Just zero out the "Annual Retirement Spending" on the main input section, and go to the "Additional Inputs" tab, and enter your retirement spending there. Instead of entering just one value for the whole retirement period, break it...

These are good ideas for the search. I use a canned java HTML display class to put up the help, so I'd need to do some rewrite to get that in. In the meantime, all of the help is also on the web site under the "technical details" section. You can use your browser search functions (and print...

Tadpole, Thanks for the Java dump. (I Think - ???) I knew I'd get one of those eventually. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the error is before the planner got launched by Java. It's complaining of a versioning error trying to launch the main class, but I don't exactly understand what's...

I posted an update to the planner tonight that adds support for incomes that don't include colas. You can specify pensions as either having colas or not having colas, and misc income as either cola or not. If you've previously run the program and haven't closed down your browser, you should...

Yeah, it was an afterthought (partly for debug) but it seemed cool. Basically, over the course of the 10,000 simulation runs, when a trial runs out of money before the end of the plan (a failure), I bump a counter associated with the year that the money ran out. At the end, I go through the...

Thanks to all for the comments... A few thoughts. 1) donheff - All the numbers used throughout the planner are in inflation adjusted dollars (I guess I need to say that somewhere other than the help or on the web site - I'll find a place). Also, you bring up a definite shortcoming of the...

I promise there are no cookies used by the site and I'm not collecting any information other than what google analytics (for ads) my ISP collects (and I'm not even sure what that is). As it turns out, Java (as opposed to javascript) is extremely safe from the user's perspective. This can even...

Donheff, Thanks for the input and for giving the program a try. To answer your questions: 1) about the spending percent floor and ceilings, your understanding of the control is correct. I would not have expected the probability of succcess to go down after lowering the cap on funding as you...

Hello, I created a new online retirement planner that leverages Monte Carlo Simulation as well as the latest research on safe withdrawal rates using decision rules. I think this is a very unique calculator based on the combination of features (and the fact that it's free) and I thought the...