I'm new to Pralana, and a recent retiree, but not new to retirement planning software. I've been using the Boglehead's Retiree Portfolio Model for quite a while to decide about Roth conversions, and am intrigued by the similarities and differences in results. Because I'm nitpicky, I decided to do a comparison between RPM and Pralana, and posted about it in the Boglehead forum.
I started with just my portfolio, no income, expenses, taxes or inflation, and proceeded to add back one at a time. I was very gratified that the results for my trial portfolio came out very similar at end of life. The EOL portfolio values continued to be similar between the two, until I added back inflation to both. From what I can determine, the taxable account is growing at a much higher rate in Pralana, and I doubt I will be able to reconcile the two. I am continuing to view results in today's $$. If I switch to future $$, the differences become crazy high, which leads me to assume the RPM is displaying things in today's $$ even when are inflation factors.
So I am now wondering, do most of you use inflation numbers in your planning? My biggest reason for using Pralana is to double check my Roth conversion plan, and that is working great. I would love to be able to trust the future $$ numbers too, and eventually I will compare what I am seeing with my Otar Retirement Planner which is another purchased tool (I think discontinued as of this year). It is very rigorous for testing whether your portfolio will last, using historical data and if I remember correctly, no need for user assumptions about inflation.
Incidentally, I also use a spreadsheet from McClung's "Living Off Your Money", which also emphasizes backtesting to arrive at a model for how much to withdraw every year, and when to sell stock if it's grown to a certain level. All of these tools are very spreadsheet oriented, picky, granular. Since I like those, I already can tell that I am going to like Pralana.
As a newbie, I would love to hear what others are doing as they set up Pralana, especially those in the retirement /decumulation time of life, and especially as regards inflation.
I just use 3% inflation, nothing fancy. No one saw the 19% inflation we've had since the end of 2020 coming and we will be just as surprised by whatever comes next.
[Edit - by the way, you definitely should use inflation, it causes you to pay extra taxes. Although the adjust most of the brackets up, each year you are still paying phantom taxes on inflation and many of your capital gains are nothing but inflation. Also, several parts of the tax code are not inflation adjusted, such as the amount of SS benefits that are exempt from taxes and the NIIT threshold, those both get less favorable every year.]
One of the cool tools for stress testing your Roth Conversion plan is that on the Analysis - Run Analysis tab, if you go to the blue bar, you can click the button on the left to change it from "Historical Sequence is inactive, click to enable" to Historical sequence is active, click to disable" and select a starting year. Then you can see how much more/less you might have wished you had converted if we get a particularly good/bad market. It can put things in perspective as to whether you really want to go to that next IRMAA tier or tax bracket.
