Gyroscopic Investing

The Optimal Retirement Planner (ORP) computes the plan that maximizes your annual retirement spending. Before retirement ORP determines which retirement savings account to contribute to. After retirement ORP spreads your saving withdrawals across the entire term of your retirement. The optimal plan schedules withdrawals from your IRA, Roth IRA and after-tax accounts in a way that minimizes the Federal and state income taxes on your taxable income from your IRA withdrawals, Social Security benefits, pensions and post retirement earned income. The optimal schedule includes IRA to Roth IRA transfers and saving pension income in your after-tax account.

ORP's core is an industrial grade linear programming optimizer. ORP is the only publicly available, retirement calculator of this genre. (There are two other such calculators but you have to be a client of a financial service to use them.) Linear programming is an Operations Research tool that has been used in many industries for the past 50 years.

http://www.i-orp.com/

Nice!

I've thought about coding something up to do this exact task, but so far haven't got around to it...

AgAuMoney wrote: Nice!

I've thought about coding something up to do this exact task, but so far haven't got around to it...

Maybe you still want to code it. Try clicking on the links on the input page to get a more detailed explanation of what they are looking for as input. You get the same page of meaningless HTML code every time. This might be a good tool but when I see this kind of sloppy coding it makes me wonder why I should trust their calculations (yes, it's free but it reminds you that you get what you pay for).

I've thought about doing something like this too because I can't find any good planning software but if I do it will initially be related only to my own situation.

Yes, please do. This one kinda sucks, sadly. Too many restrictions, lots of bugs, and it didn't even ever return any data for me. Just a blank window.

Interesting.  I didn't ask for help on any of the fields, tried the monte carlo and without.  For both it popped up a window with results that seemed valid.  Haven't had time to dig in thoroughly yet...

Edit:  The one thing I immediately noticed was missing, was the ability to put in something meaningful for my whole life policies.

AgAuMoney,

It turns out that Safari and Chrome are a little different from IE in how some parts of html is processed.  The help file failure fell into such a crack.  I assume you are using one or the other.

All fixed now; please retry.

ORP wrote: AgAuMoney,

It turns out that Safari and Chrome are a little different from IE in how some parts of html is processed.  The help file failure fell into such a crack.  I assume you are using one or the other.

All fixed now; please retry.

In regards to the help feature I thought it might be a Chrome issue too as I see this from time to time but I got the same thing in IE.

Any way, welcome to the PP forum.

P.S. - the main reason I clicked on the links for help was because in the SS section where it asked for your SS payments I didn't know whether I was supposed to put what I was currently getting or what I expected to get. That was very unclear. Down below it asks when you expect to start receiving benefits but doesn't say how much. So was I supposed to put expected benefits up above and then the year they start down below? That wasn't very clear.

Hi ORP! It's working a bit better now, but I have another suggestion for improvement: allow retirement ages below 40. Some of us don't want to wait that long. 

ORP wrote: It turns out that Safari and Chrome are a little different from IE in how some parts of html is processed.  The help file failure fell into such a crack.  I assume you are using one or the other.

I use firefox (sometimes chrome or chromium) and only on Linux.  I cannot remember the last time I used Windows to surf the web.

And besides, the site worked for me. 

Pointedstick wrote: Hi ORP! It's working a bit better now, but I have another suggestion for improvement: allow retirement ages below 40. Some of us don't want to wait that long. 

40 is a huge improvement over the other calculators.  Those don't let you go below 60.

ORP is basically an IRA disbursement calculator, accomodating all kinds of side conditions.  A 40 year old with a large IRA would be unusual at best.  Alas, retirement before age 40 gets into mathematical formulation difficulties that are not worth the effort to try to overcome.  So I'm afraid that we are stuck with a earliest retirement age of 40.  Sorry to disappoint.