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Old 06-11-2019, 11:18 AM   #41
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Originally Posted by KCinBAMA View Post
Windows/Excel Pralana Bronze is free and good enough for my purposes. https://pralanaretirementcalculator.com

The paid version offers more bells and whistles.
I downloaded and tried out the Bronze version. I noticed it's overstating the level at which I can safely withdraw with 100% safety by at least $10K/year as compared to other tools I've tried out (FIREcalc, I-orp, and a couple others). I even lowered the expected ROI to pretty low levels, increased the tax % by quite a bit and it's still overstating on the Monte Carlo simulation. I 'refreshed' the Monte Carlo calculation each time just to make sure. I don't trust it as it's not "pessimistic" enough to be realistic.
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Old 06-11-2019, 11:51 AM   #42
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Originally Posted by timo2 View Post
My tabs are [yearly summary (a graph comparing gross income vs expenses & taxes, projected)]; [Income (from present to 90 YO]; [survivor (what DW would get )]; Investment allocation (pie charts)]; [Expenses (current & projected)]; [PIA calculations (since SS only calculates if you are still working)]; Life Insurance payouts (to feed survivor chart)].
You got me beat on survivor lol! I guess I have DW blended into all my sheets. We have a saying at our house...

"What's his is mine and what's mine is mine!"
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Old 06-11-2019, 04:49 PM   #43
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I have a spreadsheet on WHERE to retire, that allows for direct comparisons of key factors that are weighted for importance to you & spouse. If anyone wants that one, just send a message. A couple of people have used it, and seemed to like it.
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Old 06-11-2019, 05:55 PM   #44
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Spreadsheet? What spreadsheet?

I just used Quicken and let it download my expenses for a couple of years, and also track my stash value.

When I looked at the expenses and saw that they were about 4% of portfolio value, I looked closer and asked myself if any of those expenses would be reduced in future years.

When things looked good enough, I just stopped work. Oh, I also ran FIRECalc to double check.
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Old 06-11-2019, 07:06 PM   #45
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I track expenses in Mint. I only need to track 1 cc and 1 bank account everything gets paid out of these 2 accounts. Mint allows a CSV file to be downloaded of expenditures, so I simply made a sheet of each month for a year and cut and paste the month's data from the CSV into its proper column. The data includes whether some transaction is a credit or a debit. I manually set credits to a negative of its value, so a $100 credit becomes a -$100 debit Then I autosum the expenditures. Takes 5 minutes and the results are accurate. A years expenditures is simply the 12 monthly sums and I come away with a record of all my expenses. My budget is a little irregular with some months more expensive than others, but it turns out the expensiveness of a one year's May for example closely matches the expensiveness the following year's May so I can understand when to move a little more money into the system. I track taxes separately, so my tax entry in the expenditure column gets set to 0 and the tax amount is stored to the right in a column called "notes".

The portfolio visualizer (PV) Monte Carlo module does calculations which closely matches Personal Capitals Monte Carlo engine. The PV calc has a line item in the report that gives you the perpetual withdrawal value for a given portfolio risk/return, typically in the WR = 3% ballpark or a little less. If you know your expenses and you know your perpetual WR you can easily understand "your number" based on data. You can "what if" inflation or bad SOR and get some idea how the portfolio will fare in those instances. My experience is accumulation is all about return since you have a W2 job and benefits to cover the risk in your life. When you loose the W2 and begin portfolio deflation risk management and tax efficiency becomes the prime objective. Less risk = smoother ride and a higher probability of success.

I don't pay much attention to FIREcalc since it's largely a calculator based on history .' PV Monte Carlo generates 10,000 likely futures and stratifies them on a Normal distribution giving you a range of possible futures. Since retirement is about not running out of money before you run out of life I think it's a good tool to understand your portfolio's limitations.
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Old 06-11-2019, 08:21 PM   #46
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GNj...ew?usp=sharing
hope you can get to this excel
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Expense Categories
Old 06-11-2019, 09:36 PM   #47
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Expense Categories

I feel that one of the most important steps is to understand your estimated expenses in retirement. I have attached a detailed expense sheet. I have shared it with many people that tell me they can retire on 30k per year. If you can, great. But it is well worth going through the exercise of reviewing all of your potential expenses.

Personally, I use this completed sheet as input to my retirement model.
Attached Files
File Type: xls Retirement_Expense_Categories_v20181231.xls (84.0 KB, 27 views)
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Old 06-11-2019, 10:39 PM   #48
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I also use Mint as well as Personal Capital. Mint tracks my expenditures the best as well as my monthly budget. P.C. is better for seeing my consolidated investments and metrics for that. Since I've used Mint for 8 years, it's provided a very accurate view of my spending over lots of months so I was able to determine a realistic yearly expense amount that I'd need to support/maintain to retire.

That is *the key* to determining the answer to "Are we there yet?"

You're *there* when your nest egg + any pension + expected social security benefits, added together and multiplied by 4% = your yearly expense amount or greater.

I use FIREcalc, which nicely answers the question: considering every market cycle in the past since the start of the stock market, based on my current nest egg, anticipated social security, and expected spending per year, will my nest egg support my spending and to what %? (100% is the best). Anything over 90% is considered a good plan.

The other thing FIREcalc answers for me is: based on the variables I input including my current nest egg and future income from social security, how much can I spend each year on average so my money will last for the entire span of time I entered, to a confidence level of <whatever % input>? (you could put 100% if you wanted to make sure there was no doubt your money would last).
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Old 06-11-2019, 10:43 PM   #49
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I also use Mint as well as Personal Capital. Mint tracks my expenditures the best as well as my monthly budget. P.C. is better for seeing my consolidated investments and metrics for that. Since I've used Mint for 8 years, it's provided a very accurate view of my spending over lots of months so I was able to determine a realistic yearly expense amount that I'd need to support/maintain to retire.

That is *the key* to determining the answer to "Are we there yet?"

You're *there* when your nest egg + any pension + expected social security benefits, added together and multiplied by 4% = your yearly expense amount or greater.
Except if you're looking at a time horizon longer than 30 yrs, that 4% might be more like 3-3.5%.

Curious if you've compared quicken vs mint. I'm currently using quicken, but the budgeting tool is driving me nuts.
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Old 06-11-2019, 11:01 PM   #50
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Except if you're looking at a time horizon longer than 30 yrs, that 4% might be more like 3-3.5%.

Curious if you've compared quicken vs mint. I'm currently using quicken, but the budgeting tool is driving me nuts.
My planning horizon when I started retirement not quite yet 2 years ago was 38 years, and 4% works out just fine according to FIREcalc, with my expected SS benefits included in the income calculation, which does make my spending less than 4%, in essence.

I first used Quicken back in the late 80's and early 90's but manually entering data was too tedious and I haven't looked at it since. What I like about the Mint tool is it's free, it did and does what I needed it to do, works in a way that makes sense to me, consolidates transactions from most all my accounts and I've customized some categories along the way, which then auto-update when the transactions come in and it all works for my budgeting. Because it's cloud-based I didn't have to worry about software updates.
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Old 06-12-2019, 12:53 AM   #51
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I used Quicken and other various retirement planners mentioned, and used a spreadsheet to summarize/analyze their data.

From Quicken I created two reports to total my expense categories over 5 and 10 year periods. I imported each into spreadsheet columns and applied average/variance formulas + personal known changes to forecast expenses in retirement. From this we came up with our target retirement expenses.

I ran many planners (Quicken, Firecalc, FRIP, Financial Engines, data from megacorp financial planning company, etc.) and summarized the results in terms of expected income during retirement, and used their average as an estimate.

From the above two, we came up with expected SWR requirement and used this to estimate the amount of cash we would need to satisfy this until SS time.

For SS, we used the SSA detailed calculator (anypia) to estimate SS amounts at several different age levels (63, 64, FRA, 70). For each level we created a column, and the rows where the years from ages 63 to 95. We put the Ss income in the respective years and used this to determine the popular "break-even" ages levels.
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Why use a spreadsheet?
Old 06-12-2019, 06:58 AM   #52
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Why use a spreadsheet?

I use Personal Capital and it can account for everything you need and more without the headache. What I like is that instead of having to use the solver function (for the withdrawal % which will work for your needss) you just input what you want to spend and it calculates whether your projected income meets that need.

Another nice thing about their tool is that it lets you have as many retirement planning scenarios as you want and can compare them.
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Old 06-12-2019, 09:33 AM   #53
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My spreadsheet has been customized to meet my needs and no effort was made to make it easily understood by others. Probably would need pages of notes for anyone else to make any sense of it.

That describes mine exactly. It started as a To-Do sheet. A few Excel tabs of that and what was checked off as done. Page four has all my accounts listed along with balances and goals to hit. A box with Firecalc results. Firecalc spending estimates. Social security expectations at various retirement ages. Calculations of how much money we can "blow" each month that isn't needed for savings.



Then a tab to track net worth over the years. A tab for what we pay in taxes each year. (It's CA, so it's way too much) A tab for income versus expenses that gets updated every few years. A tab for investment allocations over all our accounts broken into cash/lg cap/sm cap/Intl/Bonds/Treasuries/Reits/CDs/Intl Bonds. Then a few others like the calculations we used when paying off our mortgage a few years ago.



Would only make sense to me.
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Old 06-12-2019, 09:51 AM   #54
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This thread, even if actual spreadsheets are not shared, the ideas are valuable.


One thing that I did is add tabs that draw from my current position (which I update routinely) and format the data to make it easy to input to the various online tools. This way, I think about the options to providing input to the tool carefully one time and then, as I run each tool, I get consistency through time between runs.
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Old 06-12-2019, 11:21 AM   #55
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Similarly...I kept a countdown calendar on my page-a-day paper desk calendar (remember those?). Started at 1000 workdays....and smiled every day I turned a page and watched the number drop.

omni
I do a similar thing. I started it at 10 years (2600 days) at the beginning of last year with the hope of being able to retire in 10 years from then. The post-it for today says June 12th 2222.

Its always fun coming back from a week off and being able to subtract 5 from it.
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Old 06-12-2019, 12:14 PM   #56
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The post-it for today says June 12th 2222.

Its always fun coming back from a week off and being able to subtract 5 from it.
Yes-but a bit of a drag when you have more than 200 years before being able to retire
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Old 06-12-2019, 01:24 PM   #57
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I do a similar thing. I started it at 10 years (2600 days) at the beginning of last year with the hope of being able to retire in 10 years from then. The post-it for today says June 12th 2222.

Its always fun coming back from a week off and being able to subtract 5 from it.
Me as well. 2686 working days left over a 12 year period. IF I stay at current megaCorp and accrue all that future PTO.

When i do the math 61% of my next 12 years days will be spent potentially commuting to a job.

I don't think our extra 5days every 5 years up to 15 is sustainable at today's pace but we shall see.
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Old 06-12-2019, 01:25 PM   #58
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Yes-but a bit of a drag when you have more than 200 years before being able to retire
HAHA!
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