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Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple runs with random variation on assumptions.

I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is there anything better?

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I keep a personal capital sync around for pretty much their retirement planner which pulls data from your synced accounts and does some light portfolio checks / some good visualizations of sectors that you’re invested in.

https://www.personalcapital.com/

I use Wealthfront to handle this. It lets you do everything you described and can make recommendations based on your goals. You can play with things like "what if I moved to another city" and it'll tell you about housing costs, or "what if I took a 2-year sabbatical, could I still retire at 50?". I really value using them as a roboadvisor too, as someone who used to be addicted to Robinhood. I'm a huge fan.

www.cfiresim.com is also a great resource. It does monte carlo back testing of your probability of success, with success defined as "not running out of money" on a given timeline.

A big takeaway (adjustable on "Spending Plan") is "if you can reduce your expenses modestly during a downturn in retirement, your chance of success is much higher".

Sequence of Returns risk is also shown pretty well. The failure instances are commonly when your backtest year is immediately prior to a recession or The Great Depression.

https://www.firecalc.com/ is a good retirement calculator.

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