Comprehensive Planning with the Pre and Post Retirement Planner

Summary: This program is geared toward those who are serious about planning for retirement and those who are already in retirement who want a more comprehensive plan than afforded by the vast majority of Web and professional plans as well as our own Free Retirement Planner. It offers the capability to analyze more complex investments, tax, income or cost events. It is good at analyzing multiple real estate investments and numerous special financial events at any age in your life. It has two cases running independently and simultaneously so that you can compare different alternatives. This is a great aid when making decisions that may affect the rest of your life. Further, it displays results from three separate scenarios: Your own scenario, a second scenario in an historically bad period and a third scenario from an historically good period. You can compare these last two with your own scenario to gain some insight whether your results are optimistic or conservative by historical economic measures. This is a great program for professionals or those who need to take a hard look at their finances, especially before making a major financial commitment—like retirement, for example.

Link to Pre and Post Retirement Planner

More information:

The Pre and Post Retirement Planner program is much more powerful than the programs typically offered by commercial financial sites. Further, it doesn’t have optimistic or overstated default values to make a firm look good or sell a product.  We do not sell any securities or other products and only charge for our out-of-pocket expenses, the main element being licensed security data like the S&P 500 stock index.  All labor is done by volunteers.

The Pre and Post Retirement Planner offers a real step up in “planning with perspective” because you get to compare results from your own assumptions with actual historical returns and inflation from both good and bad times in the past.  Moreover, you can compare two cases simultaneously, each with its own inputs.  That is because the program is really two programs running independently of each other, and each of the two programs has three different economic scenarios.  Results are presented in graphical form to make comparisons easy and help you choose better alternatives.  No one can predict the future, but you can make better choices if you understand how different assumptions affect results.

In addition to routine entries like Social Security, pensions, annuities, part-time work and so forth, you can enter special financial events or tailored expense and income streams.  The program provides for six investment properties and their income streams. You can easily change death ages to see how survivor benefits may affect results.  Investigate things like whether life insurance or long-term-care insurance may be a good investment or whether you should convert savings to an immediate annuity or whether an IRA, taxable or tax-exempt account may fit your tax situation best.  Compare different ages to start Social Security or pensions or survival benefit alternatives.  And you can keep notes by your entries to help you remember important points.

All of this comes in only a 2 MB package because it relies on the power of Microsoft Excel or equivalent to do the heavy lifting.  Microsoft’s Works does not have enough power.  We understand that the free OpenOffice software from Sun Microsystem’s Open Source software will work with our programs.  (http:// www.openoffice.org)  You can tell whether your computer has the capability to use our programs by downloading any of the programs on this site.

To be able to change the ages and investment totals on the Pre and Post Retirement Planner, you will need to order the password.  To get the password, click here Password & CD’s or the  link located in the left frame.  Except for the ages and total investment inputs, the program is fully functional without the password.

You can download these programs by clicking on the link to it and selecting Open. This is a quick way to try out a program, but it is not a good way to save it for future use. You need to save the program to your hard drive to use it effectively and save your results. Save to a folder on your hard drive where you can find it easily.

We put the date of the program in its file name and maintain a log of previous changes to the program at the bottom of the first tab along with the reason for a change.  When you go to use the program in subsequent years, you can download the latest version and see if the reason for the change would affect your analysis.  If not, there is no reason to replace your version with the newer one.

We make changes to the password very infrequently.  If we do, you will have to order a new password for the new version.   If you have paid for a previous password on this program, email us with that information to find out about free or discounted updates.  Our email address for password information is analyzenow@att.net

Link to Pre and Post Retirement Planner