Some things in that SS sure seem hosed...
Maybe my eyes are crossed from looking at it, but it sure looks odd to me.
I did runs with a (edit)'OFF CHART SPENDING" added in year 2025, and the spreadsheet shows an inflation adjusted number whether I click
'Inflation adj?' or not. But some numbers are still different. I thought maybe there is an adjustment in some other formula, but...
The formula in COLUMN J has me going in circles:
Code:
from CELL J55 >>> =IF(I55<>"",T54+I55,T54-SUM(C55:H55))
This is the relevant part, I think the 'IF' is for the pre-retirement phase:
T54-SUM(C55:H55)
T54 is
'Ending Portfolio' from the previous year. It apparently is NOT inflation adjusted, as the next column is labeled
'Infl Adj End Portfolio' and has a multiplier to COLUMN B.
Column C is your inflated withdrawal; D,E, are Social Sec #1 & #2; F,G,H are the three
'Pension Income / Off Chart Spending' entries (labeled
Withdrawal Change 1, Withdrawal Change 2, Withdrawal Change 3). So it is taking the ending portfolio and subtracting the SUM of these...
now, here is the weird part, I entered $40K spend, $750K portfolio (on the 'START HERE' tab), and then $40K of 'off chart spending', no inflation adjustment starting in 2025. The SS has the inflation adjusted 'spend' in COLUMN C (fine), but the 'off chart spending' is in COLUMN F, not only inflated,
but as a negative number. And then it SUMS them which would seem to mean I effectively spent zero from the portfolio, but added spend means I should have twice as much (except for the off chart spending not intended to be inflation adjusted). Makes zero sense to me.
Where I get lost in all this, is that the formulas for
'Market Growth, Dividends, Fixed Income,Investment Expense' just reference numbers at the top of the sheet, which are not formulas at all ( I guess the program generates those and inserts them into this sheet). So somewhere, some adjustment is made as those numbers
are different when I check/uncheck
'Inflation adj?'. But that is invisible to me, and I have not reverse engineered it, and probably won't, at least for now.
Bottom Line: What I suspect is - this spreadsheet is really an output from the program, the figures are not used in the calculations. It is a combo of formulas to demonstrate the numbers (maybe with errors), interacting with formulas generated in the code, so we can't see the whole thing. So errors here may not mean anything. I would need to do more runs to validate this.
What it means to users (even/especially those who don't care about the 'under-the-hood' stuff): Until this is validated, it may well be that entering delayed pensions and spending are not being treated as expected.
It seems correct to me to take a 'today' SS number, and increase it by inflation up to the payout date (and after). That may or may not be the case with a non-COLA pension. Your benefit could be a fixed $ amount, to be paid in the future (like mine); or your benefits are growing with inflation up to your retirement date (not likely, but possible I suppose). And it may or may not be the case with 'spending' adjustments - if you are accounting for an end to fixed mortgage payments, that is a fixed $ amount out in the future. But some spending adjustments might change with inflation. Do we need an
"adjust for inflation up to this date" and an
"adjust for inflation after this date" check-box?
Maybe this code needs to be 'open sourced'? ........... What, no 'can-of-worms' emoticon?
-ERD50