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Originally Posted by 45th Birthday
I like Fidelity's Retirement Income Planner because it does Monte Carlo simulations in addition to taking taxes into account. You need to be a customer to use it I think, but you can open a small account online.
A few things you said makes me wonder if you are adjusting for inflation properly? You "use annual expense of $280K from 2027 onwards and annual savings of $150K until 2027," but later say you "have budgeted $100K per year, per Child (x2) for college - factoring in tuition inflation" The tuition number seems to be adjusted for inflation, but the total spending number doesn't. Best to keep everything either in today's dollars or future dollars. Also, if you are adjusting for inflation, best not to SWAG it but put actual numbers to it. Some costs (medical?) might rise faster than others. Fidelity's RIP also helps adjust for inflation.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I have a Fidelity account - both pre-tax and 401K so I will look up the retirement planner.
To answer your question - the college funds ($100K per year) are set aside already - not the entire amount, but enough to grow to that amount assuming a 5% ROI, and not part of our assets calculations. I used $280K as an expense in 2027 because I set up an excel spreadsheet to monitor the last 2-3 years expenses (mainly defining key categories) and tried to forecast expenses out to 2080 using some inflation guesses between 3% for some categories and 5% for other categories (food, fuel, etc.). The 2027 expenses came out to $210K plus kids' college expenses so I assumed $280K (with taxes) for FIRECalc. Not sure how else to account for inflation etc.
Hope that helps clarify my analytical approach. Let's see what the FIdelity calculator tells me...
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