Wednesday, November 25, 2020

We’ve Updated Our Two Actuarial Budget Calculators for Retirees

We recently received a suggestion from one of our readers that resulted in changes to our two ABCs for retirees. The suggestion came from Mr. Jerry Kiefer, a retiree with an engineering background. Mr. Kiefer was looking at our post of July 26, 2016 (we are not making this up), and suggested that it would be nice to reflect the expected proceeds from the sale of David’s, (our hypothetical retiree in that post) house in the expected runout of David’s assets in the ABC for Single Retirees. Mr. Kiefer correctly noted that doing so would eliminate the potential cash flow warning that was being produced when he entered the present value of the expected sale in the “PV Other Sources of Income” cell. 

We agreed with Mr. Kiefer, and we have therefore added two new potential income sources (that you can name), and the ABC will now calculate the present value for you. In the case of the ABC for Single Retirees, the revised spreadsheet will now reflect the anticipated income in the runout tabs. In addition to reflecting proceeds from future anticipated asset sales, the new income sources can be used to reflect survivor payments expected after the first death within a couple as discussed in our post of November 21, 2017.

If you use these new income sources, be sure to you do not double count by also adding the present value of these sources into the PV Other Sources of Income cell. 

We encourage our readers to play with the ABC’s, and we welcome suggestions regarding how they can be improved.