Retirement Program

Make a spreadsheet. It will be transparent, frustrating, and will expose the grubby details. Very rewarding and informative if you do it honestly.

I've looked at moneytree.com's silver planner. It's too expensive, but for your purposes you could use a trial version. They have useful example on their web page as well. Here is a page with some other examples:

-- jim

DG wrote:

That's a good list, although very simple comparisons. Not too many details to help a person understand the capabilities of each tool. It also doesn't consider J & L Planner

If anyone has any experience with any of the programs mentioned, I'd like to hear about your experience.

Cheers, Scott

Any chance you have a Fidelity IRA or 401(k)? They have online retirement planners.

Vanguard has a comprehensive retirement analyzer. It is free for account over a certain size. It's yet another Monte Carlo simulation. Of course, you need to be able to state major expenses and when they occur. Not to mention estimating how long you will live. So, are you going to have to pay for a quadruple heart bypass operation or are you going to have to pay for insurance to hedge against this expense? I believe the future is too complex to be able to predict in a meaningful way. But that is just me.

DP wrote:

What is your motive to try to diswade me from taking control of my future?

In addition to a one-size-fits-all retirement guesser, you also need a spelling checker.

Is everyone on this group a jerk, or just you and Stubby?

"Scott Lindner" wrote

Add an automatic spring loaded remove-foot-from-mouth device to that list.