I've created a nice tidy spreadsheet to trade off cost of a house renovation or move, vs retirement ages for my husband and myself.
The only problem is that I'm just using the 4% SWR in a very raw form, as the "size of nest egg required".
It does not include (yet)
- Tax on the RRSP portion of the savings as it is withdrawn.
- OAS/CPP benefits
Both of these are not precisely knowable, since we are not yet 50. Tax rates and CPP rules will probably change before then. It's seems wise to assume tax rates will be higher.
CPP and tax on RRSP withdrawals are each relatively large amounts. Especially CPP - even if we only were to get half of the 1000/mo maximum, it would be the equivalent of having 150,000 savings generating 4% SWR.
There isn't even an easy way to find out what we'd get if we were 65 today - the formula doesn't seem to be published.
If you're Canadian, what do you do? Do you count CPP/OAS as a given, or not?
A second question, are you counting RRSP savings as before or after tax dollars? It seems that the possible amount of tax can vary a huge amount, because of the 10k basic personal tax exemption amount. For instance if half of our savings were in RRSP, half unsheltered, and we lived on 40K/year after retirement, we could get the half (20K/year) from the RRSP tax free (10k each). If we each got 6000/year CPP, (counts as earned income), the total tax rate would still be less than 10%.
What do you do about this in your calculations?
-Count OAS/CPP or not?
-Count tax on RRSP or not ?