u/chodthewacko

Hello reddit,

I'm trying out Bolden now. We've tracked our expenses for years so I have a pretty good handle on our "must spend" vs "like to spend" in our categories.

When does "Must spend" have any affect on anything in the detailed budgeter?

As an example, in the sheet I'm playing with, I have a chance of success rate /Monte carlo of 99%.

If I now add a Travel line, with Must Have: $5000 and "Like to spend": $5000, then the chance to success and monte carlo drops to 81% success. Fair enough.

What I don't understand is, if I set "Must Have: $0" and "Like to spend:" to $5000, then the chance to success and monte carlo stays at 81%. Why does "Must Have" have no affect here?

I would expect that to be MUCH closer to 99%, since IMHO must:0,like:5000 means "I will spend up to $5000 if I can afford to" which shouldn't be hammering my chance of success.

I'm trying to "balance things out" somewhat in my monte carlo. It's an 81% success rate, but my final "Monte carlo median" value is 7x my starting amount. It feels like I should be able to spend more/guardrail harder, and on average be able to spend more without hurting my overall chance of success. But I can't figure out the settings for that.

Hi Reddit,

There are plenty of monte carlo tools out there. I think it's generally known that an '85%' monte carlo success rate means: '15% chance you will need to adjust your spending more for bad markets/SORR'.

Before I can seriously consider FiRE, I have to ask: How much adjustment are we talking about? Is it acceptably low?

And that leads to my main question: Does your retirement tool do a good job modeling what can/should happen during the "bad years"? If so, which tool and what settings are you using?

In order to get full buy-in from my wife about FiRE, what I'd ideally like to have is a monte carlo run with a consistent 100% success rate that uses guardrails to keep the ship afloat during that last 15%. And then we can focus on those 15% runs to decide if they are reasonable or not. (the other 85% should be).

I'm asking this on reddit because I'm currently playing with projectionlab. I've tried tweaking Flexible spending and guyton-klinger settings.
However when I look at some of the failing runs, my immediate reaction is, "I'm NOT going to spend that much discretionary money after that big drop." We're talking sometimes double digit withdrawal rates, tanking the net worth in the plan and then the plan fails 10-15 years after that. I'm hoping for some sort of 'Reduce discretionary spending so withdrawal percentage stays under x%' setting.

Anyway, I would think what I'm doing is normal retirement planning, so I'm curious what other people are doing? Am I just doing wrong settings? Is there another tool that does it better?