Have you got a spreadsheet to plan your retirement forecast and income?

Doshwaster

Funnily enough, I was clearing out my hard disk the other day and I found a backup of a spreadsheet projection I made in 2000 so it's now about halfway through to my supposed retirement date.

The good news is that I've slightly ahead of the salary I predicted back in 2000 and my total pension funds are above where I thought they would be now. My 200 model didn't take into account property values (as I rented at the time) and non-pension savings and investments (as I had none)

On the other hand my model had my earnings going up every year until retirement whereas now I recognise that they could peak in the next few years.

It's all a bit of fun really. No model can take account over all of life's possible events.

mozza78

My spreadsheet has a toggle to either work solely off historic data or my own implied rates. The simplified version just has housing, equity cash, dividend %, base rate and takes the average and standard deviation since it works off a monte carlo simulation. Everything on a real rate of return basis. I then have a total income column based on salary, pension, interest income, property income, dividends, other income, mortgage,.. a column that works out the tax according to a set of assumptions (currently set to the UK tax system allowances and rates) .

This gives me a cash column and if this ever hits zero in any year then I have to liquidate some assets. This of course has further tax implications but that's factored in. My main concern is that I can remain liquid on an annual drawdown of X with variation Y until I die (which I can change but I set to 95 usually to be conservative). I then can run 1000 simulations for arguments sake and see what percentage of the time I will go properly broke to give me a comfort level of what I can safely withdraw annually.