What Are Instructions

Instructions are added to accounts as child items in the plan's hierarchical tree structure. Instructions are specifications for actions such as deposits, withdrawals, transfers, and costs which result in money movements to or from accounts. There are also beneficiary instructions which move money after an account holder's death. And there is a special instruction used to change parameters at some specified year. These are all explained in other help pages. See the Documentation Pages menu.

 

Instructions Can Be Disabled Temporarily

In order to allow for doing "What-If" experiments, the Forecaster4 program lets you flag an instruction as disabled, then test the result of the change by running the calculation again with the disabled instruction not executed. This explained in another documentation page: Doing "What If" Experiments.

To disable or enable any instruction, select its tree view node and click the Edit icon. Then click on the "Disable" check box in the data entry window to set or clear it as desired. Click "Finish" and the instruction is disabled or enabled, The tree view display for the instruction's node is red with a strike-through font to indicate a disabled instruction.

 

Fast Disabled State Change Via Double Clicks Or Taps

In order to speed the use of disabled instructions for doing "What-If" comparison tests, a special feature allows you to quickly toggle the instruction's disabled state without going into Edit mode. You just double click an instruction to quickly switch its disabled state. On a touch screen device, touch once then touch again 2 seconds later. (Double tapping a touch screen is a zoom command by default.)

A video which uses this capability is the one about Roth conversion rollovers, available here:

Video Tutorials