Overview  -  Forecaster Retirement & Estate Planning

    The Forecaster program creates cash flow projections for your retirement years. Forecaster figures  the effects of investment earnings, inflation and taxes to measure the sustainability of the financial assets used to fund your retirement living expenses

Click for short animated slide show

    Use Forecaster to plan your retirement spending to make sure your wealth provides for your desired life style, and for your heirs. Forecaster takes your assumptions about earnings, inflation and taxes, along with your present financial situation, and calculates year-by-year changes to your net worth and living expenses.

    The program calculates the estate planning results of lifetime gifting to heirs, and Crummey trust gifts to pay life insurance premiums.

    You can see the yearly cash flow projections for your retirement years, and see your estate plan results.

    Click on the image to the right to see an animated slide show showing how Forecaster works.

    A Monte Carlo simulation capability lets you specify standard deviations for investment earnings and inflation to calculate the probability of reaching your goal for the final total estate value.

    Withdrawal Decision Rules simulation provides parameters for changing the portfolio withdrawal rates that provide your living expense funding during retirement years. The Forecaster program provides a way to use Monte Carlo simulation to test these rules for finding a strategy to follow for achieving the best results.

    Forecaster lets you work with many different forecasts, and save them as different files. You can try different "what-if" scenarios to find the retirement plan that is best for you.

    Financial planners, investment firm representatives, and registered representatives of brokerage firms can create and maintain forecasts for their clients. These forecasts can be used as additional material for client meetings, as references for planning sessions, and as printed documentation to send to clients. The retirement Forecaster program has the potential of being a valuable tool to help professionals inform their clients about their investment and estate planning decisions.

Features

• Easy to use outline presentation of all elements in your financial situation.
• You can specify as many people, trusts, and accounts as required to accurately define your financial situation.
• Your specified yearly retirement living expense is increased each year by the inflation factor you specify.
• Monte Carlo simulation calculation produces histogram chart and probability tables for results by following the plan's financial instructions.
• Your retirement living expense money is taken from your liquid accounts according to the best strategy: first from tax normal accounts, then from conventional IRAs, last from Roth IRAs.
• Your investment account balances are increased each year by the rate of return you specify.
• Your tax normal accounts have all appropriate taxes subtracted from yearly balances.
• Your tax deferred accounts have appropriate taxes and penalties applied to withdrawals.
• Transfers of money (gifts) from you and your spouse to other people or trusts have gift taxes applied.
• Your gifts and bequests to your spouse are given the appropriate tax free treatment.
• If minimum IRA distributions are more than you need for retirement living expenses, the excess is added to one of your tax normal accounts.
• Calculations produce charts and tables of yearly cash flows and financial events for each account.
• Your estate tax and the net amount bequeathed is calculated and shown, as per the appropriate tax act.
• The charts and tables can be exported to Excel for presentation enhancements