Do you Really Know How Much You Can Spend in Retirement?

Why This Retirement Software Gets My Vote!

Background

My wife and I, both age 62, retired 6 months ago. We sold our home in Long Beach, CA, and moved to upstate South Carolina. This uprooted both our lives and our careers.

We are real estate brokers in Long Beach with 35 years of goodwill and past clients. Moving and winding down our brokerage went hand in hand.

We left LA with an average monthly budget of $20,000 for both personal and business expenses and retired to a more affordable area with an anticipated budget of……. Well I had no idea, but I knew it would be less.

Gone are business expenses, gone is the need for future savings, gone is the high cost of living in LA.

Our original plan was to retire in 3–5 years, but interest rates doubled, slowing the volume of business. A slow market gave us the incentive to retire. We took it.

With an engineering degree, I am very analytical. My detailed asset and income calculations said we had enough to retire. I modeled our retirement income on a static excel spreadsheet.

This analysis had a lot of approximations and lots of uncertainty. When I built this excel model, I also evaluated the software…