Sorry, I've been (and still am) on vacation and haven't had time to check on the thread. But I did find a few minutes to do a few things:
1- I updated the tool so that you can now toggle between nominal and inflation adjusted values. You can see that the inflation adjusted (real) metrics for success look worse than the nominal metrics (i.e. > than initial balance or 2x initial balance).
Please give some info on the inflation toggle, i.e. is this in line with a historical inflation of the last 'x' years (x being retirement time-frame selected), or simply fixed current inflation (~2%), historical CPI, historically estimated chained-CPI?.
Is ER healthcare accounted for, because that is definitely higher than 2% inflation.
Thanks for the work you are putting in to this!
Yes, inflation is historically indexed and linked to the same annual data for stock and bond returns. There is currently no ER healthcare accounted for.
Trying to wrap my head around how the likelihood of me being broke increases when I toggle off the death curve. Is this just so everything adds up to 100%?
It's like the performance of the stock market all depends on me being alive....definitely not true.
Others have answered and in skimming them, I think the answers are correct but I thought I'd add my own, hopefully, clear explanation. The main thing is that the retirement balance probabilities (i.e. balance > start, balance< start, balance <0) is that they are all assuming that you are alive.
Conditional probability is the probability of event B occurring assuming that event A will occur (or has already occurred). If you die with money left, you cannot by definition, become broke later (i.e. probability of going broke is 0%, if you die). The probability of going broke, if you are alive until you are 80 to 100 is non-zero for many ER scenarios.
Thus removing the death wedge is like looking at the conditional probabilities of various outcomes of your retirement balance assuming you are alive throughout the entire period of interest. Including the death wedge, you are multiplying the conditional probabilities by the probability of being alive. If you have a 50% chance of being alive in a given year, then your likelihood of becoming broke cannot be over 50%.
Not sure if that is clearer or not, but adding another explanation can hopefully help people who didn't get it after the other explanations.