Author Topic: Retirement Calculator snafu!  (Read 2121 times)

NWOutlier

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Retirement Calculator snafu!
« on: June 05, 2015, 04:28:42 PM »
Ok,

I had to share this; it's the end of the day, I decieded to look at how the marke was doing to see if my Vanguard stuff would be showing profit today or a fall today... I stumble on an article about retirement and the article itself had nothing really to offer, but - It did have this calculator...  Here is the funny part though; I put in my numbers (income), then it asked "how much do you save monthly" so, I put an honest answer....  the calculator spits it back at me and says "Monthly savings amount should be at most 40% of your monthly income. We have updated your savings amount to 40%."  they readjusted my inputs to a LOWER amount, like I can't save more!?  I chuckled and finsihed the exercise, then thought I would come over and share the odd-ness of this calculator.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/retirement-calculator

my savings rate is 50% of my gross income... I guess I'm not allowed to do that....


Steve (NWOutlier)

dandarc

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Re: Retirement Calculator snafu!
« Reply #1 on: June 05, 2015, 04:37:22 PM »
Also - the lowest option available for retirement income is 55% of current income.  Apparently we'll need over 100K income when we retire.  Who knew?

skyrefuge

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Re: Retirement Calculator snafu!
« Reply #2 on: June 05, 2015, 05:17:51 PM »
ha. I've certainly seen other crappy retirement planners that have a "savings rate" slider with an unreasonably low limit, but this is the first time I've seen a GUI that instead implemented a free-text entry box that then "corrects" you if you enter an "incorrect" value. The "activeness" of that correction makes it seem even dumber than the passive limit of the slider.

Anyway, the initial answer for me is that I would get $376,000/year in retirement (it assumed age 66). Which is crazy-high. No, not just crazy-high in dollar amounts, crazy-high (i.e., optimistic) in percentage amounts. Since it says my portfolio is $6.1M, that's a 6.2% withdrawal rate. And it says that's assuming a 2% real rate-of-return. WTF?

If I tell it I'm retiring next year, it still gives a 5.6% WR. Or, really, that's not a WR, since they include Social Security in that figure, even though I wouldn't be collecting it for another 28 years (I guess the idea of retiring before you hit your SS age is another thing they didn't even consider). But even if I subtract that SS income, I'm still at a 4.5% WR.

Ah, what beautiful garbage!

 

Wow, a phone plan for fifteen bucks!