Share Your Magical Spreadsheet?

[jollystomper]

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.

 

[Lron58]

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.

 

[Pointby2]

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.

 

[sengsational]

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.

 

[Filetmerlot]

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.

 

[NgineER]

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

 

[kgtest]

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.

 

[kgtest]

Yes-but a bit of a drag when you have more than 200 years before being able to retire

HAHA!