I have a new car expense 5 years into the future. If I take that money from my 401k, it results in large taxes and other side effects. If I model that as a loan at 0% interest starting now and ending in 5 years, and eliminating the expense in 5 years, it's very beneficial to the overall analysis and reduces taxes. What I really need is a method, or a work around, to take money from the 401k and add it to the investment account so I can earn interest on it. The only way I see is to increase the minimum/maximum allowable savings but then you would have to also start pretending that savings is earning a return on the money which throws other things off. The other way I see to do this with minimal effect is to fake an expense for the 5 years and then I would just know in the background that the money will be in the investment account for later use but that throws off all the balances and math. It seems the ideal solution would be to have some kind of holding account and then also have some mechanism to specify what account a particular expense would come out of. But that's functionality not there so I wonder if there is a clever work around for this. Any ideas?
If you want to model taking money from your 401K and adding it to your investment account, the mechanism is there to do that. You do it via the Scheduled Withdrawals Table on the Financial Assets > Management page. That allows you to specify the source account, the start and stop years and the annual withdrawal amount. Taxes on those withdrawals will be handled in accordance with the laws associated with the source account (for a 401K, account, it'll be taxed as ordinary income). The funds being withdrawn will be deposited in your cash account first and, depending upon the current balance of that account and the specified ceiling, any amounts that would take the balance above the ceiling will roll over to your regular investment account. Taxes on the withdrawals will be expenses in that same year and treated in the normal manner.
