No one wants to splurge today and starve tomorrow, nor do the opposite.
ESPlannerBASIC suggests how much you should spend, save, and insure each year to achieve a stable living standard, now and through retirement, without borrowing.
ESPlannerBASIC can help you raise your spending power and make lifestyle decisions. It shows the living-standard impacts of changing jobs, contributing to retirement accounts, having children, down-sizing your home, retiring early, waiting to collect Social Security, and much more.
ESPlannerBASIC considers your economic resources, federal and state taxes, and "off-the-top" (non-discretionary) spending on housing, college, etc. in making annual discretionary spending, saving, and life insurance suggestions.
ESPlannerBASIC lets you plan many ways.
In Economics Planning mode, ESPlannerBasic suggests how much to spend each year on a discretionary basis to smooth your living standard through time without putting you into debt.
In Conventional Planning mode, you set your post-retirement discretionary spending target and ESPlannerBasic smooths your living standard, but only before you retire.
In Upside Investing mode, you specify how much to invest in the stock market. The ESPlannerBasic then builds a floor assuming your stocks lose all value and that you only spend out of safe assets. But it also shows your chances of a higher living standard once you start converting stocks to safe assets.
In Monte Carlo mode, you choose from a list of assets to tell ESPlannerBasic how you are investing your regular and retirement account assets. You also tell ESPlannerBasic whether you intend to spend aggressively, cautiously, or conservative over time, i.e., whether you will spend assuming you'll always earn the mean return, half the mean return, or a zero real return on your asets. The ESPlannerBasic uses your portfolio allocations to simulate the probability of good and bad living standard outcomes. Unlike Upside Investing, which assumes very conservative spending behavior, Monte Carlo mode lets you spend today out of risky assets and take the chance that tomorrow your wealth, and, consequently, your living standard will be lower tomorrow.
ESPlannerBASIC was developed by Laurence Kotlikoff, Professor of Economics at Boston University, and other professionals. After you try ESPlannerBASIC, consider doing more advanced planning with our download programs available at www.esplanner.com.
Employers can license an enhanced version of ESPlannerBASIC with or without Upside Investing. Contact us at info@esplanner.com for details.
