As discussed in our previous post, the fundamentals of the actuarial approach advocated in this website involve calculating the present values of future sources of revenue and future expected expenses. We have developed two Excel spreadsheets to help our readers with these calculations:
- the Actuarial Budget Calculator (ABC) and
- the Present Value Calculator (PVC).
As always, we solicit your feedback for ways to improve our spreadsheets. Please let us know how our spreadsheets can be improved and we will try to accommodate your requests.
New Team Member
I’m pleased to announce that Bobbie Kalben, FSA, has joined Kin Chan (our tireless web guru) and me in our quest to help retirees and pre-retirees (and their financial advisors) develop reasonable spending budgets. Bobbie is another retired pension actuary whose specialties include communicating complicated subjects. Bobbie’s self-described mission for this website is to translate some of the “actuarial-eze” that I too frequently use into plain English and to make some of the more complicated material here a little more accessible. While Bobbie has already been helping me out for a couple of months, the updated PVC represents her first effort at making our spreadsheets a little more user-friendly. She has also ambitiously agreed to update the ABC next. Before she completes that task, however, I wanted to release a new version of that spreadsheet that includes a new tab to help pre-retirees develop a spending/savings budget.
We encourage you to use these spreadsheets in your financial planning, and if you like them, to recommend them to your friends.
