Favorite calculator(s) to estimate how many years portfolio will potentially last...

[Tropical]

I know there are a lot of calculators where you can get an estimated idea of how many years your portfolio would last but do you have one(s) you prefer to use the most? Thanks in advance!

[Normchad]

“Rich, dead, or broke” is the most fun one…… I don’t use it for planning though…..

[Tom_T]

Ficalc is a popular choice around here, if you're looking for a quick-and-dirty analysis.

[OuterBanks]

I’ve been a big fan of this online financial calculator for a long time. I often take screenshots of the result table to track over the years.
https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/finan ... ulator.php

[Normchad]

I think the *best* tool I’ve seen so far is from EarlyRetirementNow. They have a 50 part series on SWRs, and the spreadsheet/tool that they use for all the different analysis are freely available from them. I think it’s the Early Retirement Now Toolbox, or something like that.

It’s very impressive….. it’s available as a google sheet, and I believe this is the link. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... B2Jz8/copy?

[ondarvr]

I started using New Retirement.

[Dufus]

Interesting TPAW discussion in this thread - viewtopic.php?t=331368

[mhc]

I like firecalc and cfiresim. The Fidelity retirement planner is good too. I think the tools should be simple to use, which firecalc and cfiresim are. I think complex tools can give a false sense of accuracy when planning out many decades.

[Exchme]

By far the most complete tool is Pralana Gold, I've been a customer since 2021 and have found it to be amazing.

+It has an excellent tax package including things often left out of others such as SS benefit taxation, NIIT, AMT, LTCG taxes, reverting to pre-TCJA in 2026.
+It covers a wide variety of income sources (SS, salary, windfalls, pensions, annuities, reverse mortgages) along with the correct way of taxing them and special things like 401K and HSA employee and employer contributions.
+It has a big variety of spending categories, such as property, rentals, health care (including ACA premiums), life insurance, college, charity, loans, mortgages.
+It handles lumpy spending and has flexibility on setting inflation rates on several different categories.
+It has a wide variety of withdrawal methods such as identified expenses, constant spending to deplete assets, amortization based, constant %, Guyton-Klinger, CAPE based and others.
+You can select the order of withdrawal from your different accounts and schedule specific withdrawal amounts from any account in any year including SEPP withdrawals or specific accounts to take money from (for instance I want to use up my HSA in the years prior to claiming SS to minimize LTCG taxes and eliminate the hassle of keeping track of receipts - unfortunately for me, I have had enough receipts to do this.)
+It has the ability to hold a "tax efficient" portfolio with the ability to select which accounts to fill with stocks first.
+It has the usual projected results from constant returns, the ability to change returns in the future, historical results, Monte Carlo results and the ability to show how any individual year would have fared with your plan.
+It has an excellent Roth Conversion planning tool, where for each of up to 20 years, you select who's account to prioritize and what limit to use - tax bracket, IRMAA tier, LTCG taxation or ACA FPL multiple and it instantly shows the change. Since this is an iterative exercise where you go back and forth over the years, clicking the selectors is an efficient way to find a good plan.

Currently it's a paid Excel program, it will become a web app that will have even more capability sometime in 2024.

[Doctor Rhythm]

I tend to use cFiresim when people ask about their portfolios and spend rates on this forum. I don’t use it for my own portfolio.

[FireAway]

Cfiresim

[chassis]

I know there are a lot of calculators where you can get an estimated idea of how many years your portfolio would last but do you have one(s) you prefer to use the most? Thanks in advance!

RPM spreadsheet

Portfoliovisualizer “Financial Goals” tool

[USAFperio]

Projection Lab costs similar to NewRetirement, yet I find the interface more appealing in the former. I pay for both annually. I also use the free FI Calc, CFireSim, and FireCalc from time to time.

[Tyler9000]

I'm admittedly biased, but my own Retirement Spending calculator is pretty flexible. You can enter pretty much any asset allocation you can think of, including way more asset options and home countries than most similar tools. It also lets you fine-tune the spending rules with things like spending floors and change limits. And it models every real-world retirement scenario since 1970 simultaneously to let you see the full range of historical outcomes.

[Mr. Rumples]

This simple one. I check it yearly: https://www.mycalculators.com/ca/retcalc2m.html

[southernlucky]

My go to favs:

Historical:
https://engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early/
https://engaging-data.com/visualizing-4-rule/
https://www.wealthmeta.com/calculator/r ... calculator
https://ficalc.app/
https://firecalc.com/

Monte Carlo:
https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VG ... ggCalc.jsf

[David Jay]

I like FireCalc for the spaghetti graph presentation. It helps to remind me (a recovering engineer) of the huge dispersion of possible outcomes.

I feel that calculators which return a single number (or a single percentage) tend to mislead by their precision.

[Gennaro Dillinger]

I use newretirement.com, great for this and much more. I also like firecalc very much, too.

[Norsky19]

This simple one. I check it yearly: https://www.mycalculators.com/ca/retcalc2m.html

+1

[JeffRome2023]

Not much support for i-ORP?

[mhc]

Not much support for i-ORP?

From what people have been saying, i-ORP has not been maintained for several years.

[Thesaints]

Pretty much any calculator will do. The estimate is so imprecise, that a bad calculator is almost as valuable as a good one.

[bonesly]

I just roll my own Monte Carlo in Excel which has plenty of built-in statistical and finance functions to do the job; I get a data set from NYU. The results seem pretty comparable to the Vanguard Monte Carlo linked earlier by southernlucky.

[WhitePuma]

By far the most complete tool is Pralana Gold, I've been a customer since 2021 and have found it to be amazing.

+It has an excellent tax package including things often left out of others such as SS benefit taxation, NIIT, AMT, LTCG taxes, reverting to pre-TCJA in 2026.
+It covers a wide variety of income sources (SS, salary, windfalls, pensions, annuities, reverse mortgages) along with the correct way of taxing them and special things like 401K and HSA employee and employer contributions.
+It has a big variety of spending categories, such as property, rentals, health care (including ACA premiums), life insurance, college, charity, loans, mortgages.
+It handles lumpy spending and has flexibility on setting inflation rates on several different categories.
+It has a wide variety of withdrawal methods such as identified expenses, constant spending to deplete assets, amortization based, constant %, Guyton-Klinger, CAPE based and others.
+You can select the order of withdrawal from your different accounts and schedule specific withdrawal amounts from any account in any year including SEPP withdrawals or specific accounts to take money from (for instance I want to use up my HSA in the years prior to claiming SS to minimize LTCG taxes and eliminate the hassle of keeping track of receipts - unfortunately for me, I have had enough receipts to do this.)
+It has the ability to hold a "tax efficient" portfolio with the ability to select which accounts to fill with stocks first.
+It has the usual projected results from constant returns, the ability to change returns in the future, historical results, Monte Carlo results and the ability to show how any individual year would have fared with your plan.
+It has an excellent Roth Conversion planning tool, where for each of up to 20 years, you select who's account to prioritize and what limit to use - tax bracket, IRMAA tier, LTCG taxation or ACA FPL multiple and it instantly shows the change. Since this is an iterative exercise where you go back and forth over the years, clicking the selectors is an efficient way to find a good plan.

Currently it's a paid Excel program, it will become a web app that will have even more capability sometime in 2024.

This sounds amazing.

Does it have any drawbacks that you’re aware of?

Given its robustness, how straightforward and user-friendly is the interface?

What is the approx. cost? One time or annual?

[bonesly]

Does it have any drawbacks that you’re aware of?

George Box (statistician) was fond of saying "all models are wrong, some are useful."

Given its robustness, how straightforward and user-friendly is the interface?

The Chicago Bogleheads Chapter featured this in a recorded Chapter Series HERE. Presumably if you watch the video, you might get a feel for how others use it.

Pralana's own site also has a video walk-through HERE.

What is the approx. cost? One time or annual?

Bronze is no cost, while Gold appears to be a one-time fee of $99 as noted HERE. The model is a set of Excel files/macros/extensions that you download (you need a Microsoft Excel license separately to use this). A web-based recurring subscription version is coming in 2024.

----------
Alternative calculators are discussed on TheBalance site in a March 2022 article on The Best Retirement Calculators with features, pros, and cons.

[Exchme]

This sounds amazing.

Does it have any drawbacks that you’re aware of?

Given its robustness, how straightforward and user-friendly is the interface?

What is the approx. cost? One time or annual?

It's been an annual fee of $99 for years (previous years' versions keep working, but inflation means the tax brackets are wrong, so are no longer useful). They've said there will be a price increase for 2024, but I haven't seen how much. There is a web version coming in 2024, they originally were hoping for January, my understanding is that it won't be that soon, they will update the current spreadsheet version with the 2024 brackets while they continue to develop the web version.

The main user issue is that all that flexibility means you have to learn the program in depth to use the fancier parts. But it's well organized so I ignore the modules that I don't use like Life Insurance, Business Loans, Mortgages, Annuities, Rental Property, College, etc.

Like any program, there are limits to what it can do.

There are a few graphs included, but maybe not as slick or as plentiful as you might want.

It doesn't track the LTCGs associated with rebalancing in taxable. (I'm not aware that any consumer grade product does)

There is a math quirk in that since it is a spreadsheet, iterative calculations are restricted to a few optimizer calculations that take time, they don't want to attempt them in the main sheet. Since the program determines how many assets you need to sell to manage your cash, that can create the need to iterate, especially since it is also targeting how many Roth conversions you can do within IRMAA tiers or ACA which are AGI limits (doing a Roth conversion creates taxes which requires cash, which requires asset sales, which generate LTCGs, which increases AGI, which decreases the space for Roth conversions...). The program solves that conundrum by putting this year's LTCGs in the next year. That's totally fine over a lifetime, but at transition points (work to ACA, SS claim year, etc.), the tax picture isn't really right. They've said that the web version will be able to do the iteration and get that right.

The time resolution on SS claiming is annual on your birthday. That will also be upgraded in the web version to allow you to choose the month.

I think those things are very minor and are often in features not even attempted in competitor programs. And of course, they are trivial compared to our inability to predict the future.

Overall, I think it's an amazing value, I wish I had found it earlier, it helped me understand and plan our finances so much better.

[hudson]

I know there are a lot of calculators where you can get an estimated idea of how many years your portfolio would last but do you have one(s) you prefer to use the most? Thanks in advance!

Tropical,
I never warmed up to calculators as they rely on the unknown future.
I estimate expenses and deduct future estimated income giving me expenses-to-cover with holdings.
I would divide my holdings by expenses-to-cover to estimate years.
Then I would buy TIPS to cover the number of years that I want to protect.
You've probably already read William (Bill) Bernstein? search.php?author_id=2464&sr=posts

[calmaniac]

By far the most complete tool is Pralana Gold, I've been a customer since 2021 and have found it to be amazing.

-----SNIP----

Currently it's a paid Excel program, it will become a web app that will have even more capability sometime in 2024.

This sounds amazing.

Does it have any drawbacks that you’re aware of?

Given its robustness, how straightforward and user-friendly is the interface?

What is the approx. cost? One time or annual?

Per the developer, the web version should go live in mid January 2024.

https://pralanaretirementcalculator.com ... -versions/

Pralana is probably overkill if you are just trying to "estimate how many years portfolio will potentially last", but after reading a gazillion posts on retirement calculators, it seems like Pralana is the best of the "full featured" or "geek class" retirement calculators. New Retirement comes out as highly rated in the "user friendly class" of calculators.

Pralana Bronze (more limited functionality) is free. Try it to see if you like it first.
https://pralanaretirementcalculator.com/pralana-bronze/

[smitcat]

This sounds amazing.

Does it have any drawbacks that you’re aware of?

Given its robustness, how straightforward and user-friendly is the interface?

What is the approx. cost? One time or annual?

It's been an annual fee of $99 for years (previous years' versions keep working, but inflation means the tax brackets are wrong, so are no longer useful). They've said there will be a price increase for 2024, but I haven't seen how much. There is a web version coming in 2024, they originally were hoping for January, my understanding is that it won't be that soon, they will update the current spreadsheet version with the 2024 brackets while they continue to develop the web version.

The main user issue is that all that flexibility means you have to learn the program in depth to use the fancier parts. But it's well organized so I ignore the modules that I don't use like Life Insurance, Business Loans, Mortgages, Annuities, Rental Property, College, etc.

Like any program, there are limits to what it can do.

There are a few graphs included, but maybe not as slick or as plentiful as you might want.

It doesn't track the LTCGs associated with rebalancing in taxable. (I'm not aware that any consumer grade product does)

There is a math quirk in that since it is a spreadsheet, iterative calculations are restricted to a few optimizer calculations that take time, they don't want to attempt them in the main sheet. Since the program determines how many assets you need to sell to manage your cash, that can create the need to iterate, especially since it is also targeting how many Roth conversions you can do within IRMAA tiers or ACA which are AGI limits (doing a Roth conversion creates taxes which requires cash, which requires asset sales, which generate LTCGs, which increases AGI, which decreases the space for Roth conversions...). The program solves that conundrum by putting this year's LTCGs in the next year. That's totally fine over a lifetime, but at transition points (work to ACA, SS claim year, etc.), the tax picture isn't really right. They've said that the web version will be able to do the iteration and get that right.

The time resolution on SS claiming is annual on your birthday. That will also be upgraded in the web version to allow you to choose the month.

I think those things are very minor and are often in features not even attempted in competitor programs. And of course, they are trivial compared to our inability to predict the future.

Overall, I think it's an amazing value, I wish I had found it earlier, it helped me understand and plan our finances so much better.

"Overall, I think it's an amazing value, I wish I had found it earlier, it helped me understand and plan our finances so much better."
Yes - we agree 100%.
Initial fee is $100...updates are $50

[retireIn2020]

This simple one. I check it yearly: https://www.mycalculators.com/ca/retcalc2m.html

+1

X2, KISS method for me.

[stocknoob4111]

The best most intuitive one i've found is FiCalc https://ficalc.app

I've used NewRetirement and did not care much for it, was too complicated to use and half the stuff was really unintuitive and made no sense to me.

[ichee_marone]

I use a lot of them, but right now Projection Labs seems to be the best: https://projectionlab.com/

[ichee_marone]

I use a lot of them, but right now Projection Labs seems to be the best: https://projectionlab.com/

[orlandoman]

Check out the no-cost downloadable Flexible Retirement Planner - https://www.flexibleretirementplanner.com/wp/

[KiwiBobs]

I started with newretirement then switched to Pralana Gold after watching a BH YouTube video on it. Pralana makes newretirement look like a toy. So powerful and the huge user manual explains how the calculations are made.

[Raspberry-503]

It all depends on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. Some of the tools have quite a learning curve.
Firecalc, cFiresim and FiCalc are pretty similar and in my opinion have the right level and simplicity and power. They all use historical data and tell you whether you would have made it if you retired in every of the last 100+ years. History doesn't repeat itself but if your portfolio would have survived retiring in the late 1960s, it's reassuring.

I like firecalc because it's good at modeling the accumulation phase pre-retirmrement, so if you are 5 years away you can enter info about contributions.
I also like that it will solve "what staring portfolio do I need for X% success" types of problems.

FiCalc is great for exploring alternative withdrawal rates other than some fixed yearly amounts. It also lets you zoom in on a specific year to see how/why it would have failed.

Some of the other tools mentioned at best to a really start building a plan, for example if you will retire soon or are retired and want to play "what if" with Roth conversions, which account to pull from next year, and how to optimize taxes.

[justawingingit]

By far the most complete tool is Pralana Gold, m

Does it have a way to enter cost basis information? I like Fidelity’s, but it doesn’t let me factor for which holdings would be a little capital gains versus massive.

[smitcat]

I'm admittedly biased, but my own Retirement Spending calculator is pretty flexible. You can enter pretty much any asset allocation you can think of, including way more asset options and home countries than most similar tools. It also lets you fine-tune the spending rules with things like spending floors and change limits. And it models every real-world retirement scenario since 1970 simultaneously to let you see the full range of historical outcomes.

I really love that site and the calculator - thank you !!

[Exchme]

By far the most complete tool is Pralana Gold, m

Does it have a way to enter cost basis information? I like Fidelity’s, but it doesn’t let me factor for which holdings would be a little capital gains versus massive.

You get to enter the overall unrealized gains and any carryover losses. The program allows you to select whether to harvest gains first, use the average or take gains last. I use the "average" selection, but since we have some things with large gains that we don't think we'll ever have to sell, I just did a quick manual side calculation and excluded those gains from the value I enter.

It does not try to track individual investment's gains and losses - remember that among other things, it allows you to do historical and Monte Carlo studies, that becomes impossible with holdings that deviate from the market.

[Eagle33]

As someone once said "In financial planning, greater precision only provides the illusion of greater accuracy. All data is, by definition, backward-looking while all decisions are, by definition, forward-looking."
So don't get caught going done a rabbit hole looking for the perfect answer. Remember to live today.

[Ptarmigan]

Check out the no-cost downloadable Flexible Retirement Planner - https://www.flexibleretirementplanner.com/wp/

I'm glad it's not just me that uses this.

[orlandoman]

Check out the no-cost downloadable Flexible Retirement Planner - https://www.flexibleretirementplanner.com/wp/

I'm glad it's not just me that uses this.

It's a great no-cost downloadable retirement calculator, I've been using it for years. Since, it's no-cost, no $ to market or publicize, I guess. Since it resides on your computer, you have complete control, access & confidentiality. Because of that, there is slight extra work to occasionally update tax rates, inflation rates, etc.

[GaryA505]

I use New Retirement, Maxifi, and the free one on Fidelity (based on eMoney). If I had to pick one it would be New Retirement. The customer support is excellent.

I tired Pralana but but couldn't get the hang of it. It has a long user manual but I'm too lazy to read it.