Thinking About Retiring Early?

The primary purpose of this website is to help the retirees and near retirees who happen to stumble across this blog site make better financial decisions. We attempt to do this by providing relatively simple tools (spreadsheets) and processes which utilize basic actuarial and financial economics principles. These tools and processes, which are available for free, can be used by DIYers or by financial advisors to quantify the effects of various options available to retired or near-retired households with respect to their spending and investing. The authors of this blog are retired actuaries. Neither of us receives any direct or indirect compensation from visits to this website or from any activity associated with this blog.

Planning on Temporary Higher Levels of Inflation

This is a follow-up to our post of January 30, 2022 on stress-testing your retirement plan for rising interest rates/inflation. In this post, we will provide you with a work-around for the Actuarial Financial Planner for Retirees (AFP) default inflation assumption if you believe that today’s increased rates of inflation relative to interest rates will be temporary and will revert back to “more normal rates” in the future. 

Will Kitces.com Guarantee the 4% Rule?

In this post, we will discuss a recent Kitces.com post defending the 4% Rule, and we will compare this widely-used rule of thumb with the Actuarial Financial Planner (AFP) approach for a hypothetical single retiree. We believe the example illustrates that many retirees can better meet their spending goals and better manage their investment risk by using the AFP approach rather than the 4% Rule.