Talk:Tools and calculators

Welcome to Tool Talk...

Lifestyle Calculators
The MSN money calculator includes driving habits, while the Living to 100 calculator asks many detailed questions about your diet.

If you have a good diet, exercise, sleep well, don't smoke, and drink moderately, you will live a long time. If you have a problematic family medical history, chances are you will, too. If you drive like a maniac (or talk on a cellphone while driving!), your life expectancy will be shortened.

Caveat: I have no medical background, but this is my review of life expectancy calculators. LadyGeek 19:24, 15 February 2009 (UTC) (updated)

Retirement Calculators
''Need someone knowledgeable to provide comment/rating of these. Some are monte carlo, others not. Each has pros and cons.''

What is the policy on linking to some of the commercial planning software that are mentioned on the forum? I can think of the following:
 * Jim Otar's spreadsheet
 * E$Planner

Yttrium 18:20, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * My thinking is that as long as it meets the wiki "standards" and is not an advertisement, I would use it. Many of the links I put here are from forum recommendations. I put references to forum threads where appropriate. LadyGeek 18:55, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

--ThePrune 19:49, 7 September 2011 (EDT) I am trying out all the listed Retirement Calculators so that I can assign them to my "Introduction to Retirement Spending Models" wiki article's category scheme. The Bloomberg Retirement Planner is not actually a retirement planner. It either predicts a total savings at retirement given your assumptions about annual contributions, or predicts your annual contribution needed given a target total savings. I suggest dropping it from the list!

IRA
A quick review of the RMD calculators: LadyGeek 22:35, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) Calculator
 * This calculator appears to take all of Publication 590's tables into account. I could match the life expectancy against the Google Docs Pub 590 Life expectancy spreadsheet. It wouldn't hurt to compare the life expectancies for both this calculator and the spreadsheet to be sure you are using the right table. Understand that there are subtleties in determining the applicable table, so check against Publication 590 to be sure. The rate of inflation is not addressed.

Mortgage Calculators
Added mortgage calculator section as suggested by this forum thread: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=440702#440702 Holding off on the Mortgage Professor web site, as it has been offline for 2 days so far.
 * Mortgage Professor web site is back up, calculators added LadyGeek 01:26, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Mutual Fund Fee Calculators
There's enough calculators listed to need a re-org, so I alphabetized them. I changed DSInvestor's spreadsheet to a wiki page link. The wiki software keeps track of page links, so it's better to do it this way. Also, it's easier to read without the URL superscript icon. LadyGeek 02:29, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Broker check
This section was rewritten based on comments in Investment Advisor or do it ourselves. It might be better as a stand-alone page, but it's more important to get the content correct first. OTOH, Wikipedia has sufficient information; which is referenced. The intent is to give a basic understanding of the differences between Investment Advisers and Broker-Dealers. Then, the reader will know the differences between the SEC's and FINRA's databases.--LadyGeek 22:05, 26 September 2011 (EDT)

Updated content is OK, based on PM from forum member dodonnell (posts referenced in article). --LadyGeek 22:42, 26 September 2011 (EDT)