Retirement planning is often dominated by withdrawal rules, Monte Carlo probabilities, and portfolio‑centric heuristics. But none of these tools directly measure the core financial question every retired household faces: Can my assets support the lifetime spending I want—including the occasional big purchase—without jeopardizing long‑term solvency?
The actuarial answer is funded status.
Many users have told me they aren’t always sure how to enter their assets and spending liabilities into the Actuarial Financial Planner (AFP) Excel workbooks. That’s completely understandable — the actuarial approach is powerful, but it’s also more detailed than traditional “safe withdrawal rate” tools.
To make things easier, Microsoft Copilot can now review your completed AFP workbook and provide a clear, structured summary of what you entered — along with comments on your actuarial funded status.
Retirement researchers increasingly recognize that real spending does not remain flat throughout retirement. As Dr. David Blanchett emphasized in his recent Think Advisor article:
“Integrating reduced real spending into retirement income models not only improves the outcome of decisions around appropriate portfolio withdrawal rates, but also optimal portfolios, allocations to lifetime income, and so forth. Therefore, the more widely reduced real spending is leveraged in retirement research and financial planning tools, the more realistic the guidance is going to be.”