I can't reach www.i-orp.com

walkinwood

Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Joined
Jul 16, 2006
Messages
3,525
Location
Denver
I've tried since Sat 3/9. No luck at www.i-orp.com or www.i-orp.net


tracert says "unable to resolve target system name", so it looks like a DNS issue. Same result if I change the DNS server that I use.



Anyone else having this issue?
 
The program hasn't been updated, even for tax brackets, since 2020 and we've had 20% inflation since then. Secure 2.0 changed the RMD age for many, so that isn't current either. Add in I-orp's longstanding issues like not doing IRMAA correctly (it assesses IRMAA based on the current year's income, not two years prior), so the Roth conversion plan for age 63-64 could be badly misguided. The author passed away and the program's useful life is over, I suggest you move on to something else.
 
The beauty of I-orp was that you could get some kind of answer very quickly, all of the alternatives have a harder learning curve. I-orp could do holistic math over your lifetime, whereas for the alternatives, you will have to set up things like a Roth Conversion plan and test whether each step of Conversion helped or hurt.

If they only question you are trying to answer is "do I have enough to retire?", the FireCalc program is nice in that it gives you historical analysis of how you might have fared in past markets. That is a great starting point as it gives you a feel for your overall risk level. It's not a planning program so does not address questions like Roth Conversions, account withdrawal order, or calculate any taxes.

I use Pralana Gold (paid Excel sheet), it is very powerful and flexible, they plan to release it as a web app by summer. It has static projections (like I-orp) and historical returns and Monte Carlo are available. You can use a variety of withdrawal methods, from setting your expenses to consumption smoothing (like I-orp), to amortization based, variable percentage, etc. It can handle many different kinds of variable cash flows and accounts.

For Roth Conversion planning, for each year, you select whose account to convert first and the ordinary income bracket or other common limits like IRMAA tiers, LTCG tax phase-in or ACA FPL and the program instantly tells you the impact on your final estate value.

Pralana Gold's tax package is the best of the available programs, you tell it about your ordinary and qualified dividend vs. retained capital gains and carryover gains and losses and it will track your average unrealized gains and losses. When you need to sell to raise cash, it will apply taxes. This is important as one of the key brakes on doing Roth Conversions is the need to sell something to pay taxes, other programs miss the resulting capital gains taxes and so may overstate the desirability of Roth Conversions.

A free alternative that is fairly powerful is the bogleheads.org Retiree Portfolio Model (RPM) spreadsheet, available at their wiki. I found hard to learn and annoying that I had to write formulas to take into account things like variable income or expenses. It has a Monte Carlo optional program, but I never tried that. From what I know, RPM and Pralana Gold are the only ones to support a "tax efficient" asset allocation, where you put bonds in your IRA, stocks in Roth & taxable. That's the strategy many/most people use, and since it already helps on taxes, it reduces the urgency of Roth Conversions, so it's quite important that your model supports it.

I have seen folks use a paid web app called NewRetirement, though I've heard it described as much less powerful than Pralana Gold.

There is a thread somewhere on this site about folks using the free Fidelity tool, though I don't know anything about it.

Expect to spend time learning the tool and be inquisitive about the results before taking action, maybe try another tool and run your circumstances by the folks here. You do not want to miss something important.

There are one-time-fee based planners you can hire instead of doing the work yourself, but they cost several thousands and need to be paid each time you re-plan. Stay away from the Asset-Under-Management fee types, their fees, plus high cost investments and often self-serving advice will cost you at least tens of thousands per year.
 
Same. I-Orp.com can't be located. An alternative is the Retiree Portfolio Model spreadsheet.

I use RPM extensively and should warn that it is quite the beast of a model given very high level of detail and Excel platform (have to download it). That said, the Roth conversion modeling is extensive - though no idea just how accurate. Also, it calc's taxes, which is a great feature, though again, no idea how accurate - just know its more accurate than I could estimate on my own.
 
James quit responding to emails a few years back, but had a hosting agreement that continued for a while. I tried to get the source code, but was not successful. There was another guy that had a linear programming optimizer solution like i-orp. That one never got off the ground, AFAIK. Too bad. I liked the premise of i-orp. I have a spreadsheet that replicates the exposed calculations, but the tax calculation is just an annual amount, and if that (or anything else) gets changed, it needs to be re-optimized, and I don't have that automated. There's not much that I can learn from i-orp now that I didn't already learn...my situation is stable, so earlier plans are pretty good, albeit not aligned precisely with the tax changes. But I know which levers do what, so can operate "the machine" to get pretty reasonable results without new i-orp runs.
 
The beauty of I-orp was that you could get some kind of answer very quickly, all of the alternatives have a harder learning curve. I-orp could do holistic math over your lifetime, whereas for the alternatives, you will have to set up things like a Roth Conversion plan and test whether each step of Conversion helped or hurt.

If they only question you are trying to answer is "do I have enough to retire?", the FireCalc program is nice in that it gives you historical analysis of how you might have fared in past markets. That is a great starting point as it gives you a feel for your overall risk level. It's not a planning program so does not address questions like Roth Conversions, account withdrawal order, or calculate any taxes.

I use Pralana Gold (paid Excel sheet), it is very powerful and flexible, they plan to release it as a web app by summer. It has static projections (like I-orp) and historical returns and Monte Carlo are available. You can use a variety of withdrawal methods, from setting your expenses to consumption smoothing (like I-orp), to amortization based, variable percentage, etc. It can handle many different kinds of variable cash flows and accounts.

For Roth Conversion planning, for each year, you select whose account to convert first and the ordinary income bracket or other common limits like IRMAA tiers, LTCG tax phase-in or ACA FPL and the program instantly tells you the impact on your final estate value.

Pralana Gold's tax package is the best of the available programs, you tell it about your ordinary and qualified dividend vs. retained capital gains and carryover gains and losses and it will track your average unrealized gains and losses. When you need to sell to raise cash, it will apply taxes. This is important as one of the key brakes on doing Roth Conversions is the need to sell something to pay taxes, other programs miss the resulting capital gains taxes and so may overstate the desirability of Roth Conversions.

A free alternative that is fairly powerful is the bogleheads.org Retiree Portfolio Model (RPM) spreadsheet, available at their wiki. I found hard to learn and annoying that I had to write formulas to take into account things like variable income or expenses. It has a Monte Carlo optional program, but I never tried that. From what I know, RPM and Pralana Gold are the only ones to support a "tax efficient" asset allocation, where you put bonds in your IRA, stocks in Roth & taxable. That's the strategy many/most people use, and since it already helps on taxes, it reduces the urgency of Roth Conversions, so it's quite important that your model supports it.

I have seen folks use a paid web app called NewRetirement, though I've heard it described as much less powerful than Pralana Gold.

There is a thread somewhere on this site about folks using the free Fidelity tool, though I don't know anything about it.

Expect to spend time learning the tool and be inquisitive about the results before taking action, maybe try another tool and run your circumstances by the folks here. You do not want to miss something important.

There are one-time-fee based planners you can hire instead of doing the work yourself, but they cost several thousands and need to be paid each time you re-plan. Stay away from the Asset-Under-Management fee types, their fees, plus high cost investments and often self-serving advice will cost you at least tens of thousands per year.

Very nice summary of available options! Agree w/your comments on RPM. great tool, big learning curve. I think you've just about convinced me to sign up for Pralana Gold for that extra bit of tax planning detail. I downloaded the manual, was not thrilled with the user interface though assume that will be changing shortly with the online version.
 
The program hasn't been updated, even for tax brackets, since 2020 and we've had 20% inflation since then. Secure 2.0 changed the RMD age for many, so that isn't current either. Add in I-orp's longstanding issues like not doing IRMAA correctly (it assesses IRMAA based on the current year's income, not two years prior), so the Roth conversion plan for age 63-64 could be badly misguided. The author passed away and the program's useful life is over, I suggest you move on to something else.


Thanks for that information and for the extended write-up on Pralana Gold.


I've been ER'd for a while now, but wanted to see what i-ORP thought of our current situation. I'll have to give Pralana Gold a whirl.
 
Have tried to launch, doesn't work, maybe because I'm on a Mac.
It wouldn't launch on my Windows 10 PC in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge either, and it wouldn't launch when running the jnlp file. Just a quick error that it couldn't launch it.

I uninstalled Java 8 and it ran in Java 7 by launching from the jnlp file. Then I upgraded to the latest Java 8, an it ran in Java 8 by launching the file. I didn't really do anything with it beyond that at this point, but it looked ready to use.

IT (including myself) had to fight with Java versions for years during my last job. This is the first time I've had to deal with it in a while, now being retired.

I haven't used Retiree Portfolio Model (RPM) spreadsheet or Pralana Gold (or Bronze). Of course, I don't really want to spend $100/yr for my particular needs.

Here's a quick and easy one that factors your chance of death:

https://engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early/

There's the Case Study Spreadsheet from another retirement forum:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19trTvaOPryFWiaup24dasbjJP6jl2SLB/edit?usp=sharing
 
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Have tried to launch, doesn't work, maybe because I'm on a Mac.


The Flexible Retirement Planner can be run two ways. The first option is to run it online or on the web. I'm not sure I've ever done that. If I did, it was probably very early on. It can also be run from your computer. Under the Download option, you can download FRP for either Windows or Mac/Linux. I have been running FRP from my computer because I wanted the ability to save my data file. That might be possible to with the online version but I don't know.


The person behind FRP, Jim Richmond, is very responsive to questions in the support forum. The documentation files are very helpful too. Warning though. There is a bit of a learning curve although most of the program is pretty intuitive. On the other hand, calculators that just ask you 3-4 "easy questions" (such as your age, total assets, favorite color and favorite food) and then let you just click and get the answer, are a waste of time.


I preferred to have the documentation files on my computer so I would have one big file instead of multiple pages from the website. I could also then highlight things in the PDF file. Instead of downloading the pages from the website one at a time and creating my own PDF, I contacted Mr. Richmond and asked if he would be able to send me one PDF file with all the documentation pages. He gladly did so. And that was all before I made a financial contribution to help support the program.


One thing I really like about FRP is that I have more of an ability to understand how the program operates and why it comes up with the results it does. I call this being able to "look under the hood." I'm no software expert so I couldn't understand the code even if I could literally look under the hood of the software. But the documentation does a pretty good job of explaining calculations. Also, whenever a user has posted a question to the forum about why the software does or does not do something, Mr. Richmond is very open to explaining how things work.



Good luck with it. I hope you can get it run on your Mac. In the end, FRP might not be right for you. But I think it is well worth the investment of some time, even if ultimately you decide it is not right for you. I have tried many calculators myself over the years. But I usually learn something from the process even if I ultimately decide not to keep a particular calculator in my arsenal.
 
I didn't see a way to save when launching the jlnp file. But downloading the exe installed for Windows results in it saying it's an Evaluation version. Looks like you need to donate $10 to $20 for the license, which may be worth it. Just FYI.
 
I didn't see a way to save when launching the jlnp file. But downloading the exe installed for Windows results in it saying it's an Evaluation version. Looks like you need to donate $10 to $20 for the license, which may be worth it. Just FYI.


That could be. I don't recall having to donate anything in order to be able to save the data file. But I've used FRP for so long that perhaps things have changed. Good to hear your experience though.
 
That could be. I don't recall having to donate anything in order to be able to save the data file. But I've used FRP for so long that perhaps things have changed. Good to hear your experience though.
Oh, it still lets you save. Apparently, it's just the extra startup screen you can click past regarding license.

On their website, it says:

"Individuals running the standalone planner for non-commercial purposes may use the planner’s full-featured evaluation mode indefinitely."
 
It wouldn't launch on my Windows 10 PC in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge either, and it wouldn't launch when running the jnlp file. Just a quick error that it couldn't launch it.

I uninstalled Java 8 and it ran in Java 7 by launching from the jnlp file. Then I upgraded to the latest Java 8, an it ran in Java 8 by launching the file. I didn't really do anything with it beyond that at this point, but it looked ready to use.

IT (including myself) had to fight with Java versions for years during my last job. This is the first time I've had to deal with it in a while, now being retired.

I haven't used Retiree Portfolio Model (RPM) spreadsheet or Pralana Gold (or Bronze). Of course, I don't really want to spend $100/yr for my particular needs.

Here's a quick and easy one that factors your chance of death:

https://engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early/

There's the Case Study Spreadsheet from another retirement forum:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19trTvaOPryFWiaup24dasbjJP6jl2SLB/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks - with respect to flexibleretirementplanner, I'm only willing to jump thru so many hoops - I've tried it multip[le times, gave up.

I love the "will your money last" calculator. Too simple for most of my needs, but provides a perfect illustration of why FIRE makes sense.
 
Thanks - with respect to flexibleretirementplanner, I'm only willing to jump thru so many hoops - I've tried it multip[le times, gave up.

I love the "will your money last" calculator. Too simple for most of my needs, but provides a perfect illustration of why FIRE makes sense.
I ended up downloading the installable version that was mentioned above. It allows you to save your file as well. There is a mac version. It looks like a better option than the web version.

https://www.flexibleretirementplanner.com/wp/download/
 
I ended up downloading the installable version that was mentioned above. It allows you to save your file as well. There is a mac version. It looks like a better option than the web version.

https://www.flexibleretirementplanner.com/wp/download/


My recollection is that the installable version was a better option than the web version. Since I like FRP, I wanted to be able to save my data file and not risk the loss of data and having to reenter everything. I also bookmark my FireCalc page but that process is much more cumbersome in my opinion. If FRP is lot loading on anyone's computer, my guess is that you have some other issues to deal with, maybe settings, maybe Java.
 
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