I am a new user and having difficulty understanding the Earliest Safe Retirement Date results. We have completed various scenarios, each with 90 to 100% success rates. I am 64 and using a desired retirement age of 65 (end of this year). My wife is not working any longer. When running the optimization I'll get a date where I retire at 72. Run it again and it says 66. Run it again and it is 70. Each time I get these wild variations, which makes no sense to me when my MC analysis has >90% success rate. Is there an explanation for this. How do I know which outcome is valid? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Joseph, I agree that this amount of variation makes the value questionable. I think the reason is two-fold: the Monte Carlo algorithm contains a certain amount of randomness by its nature and the retirement date optimization algorithm stops looking for a better solution when the success rate of a given retirement date is 90% + or - 5%. With that said, though, I'm going to spend some time investigating the behavior of this algorithm and see if I can find a way to tighten it up a bit. If you'd be willing to email me an export file, that would be useful to me to test this with your actual case.
Stuart
@smatthews51 Hi Stuart - you may recall I had a similar problem last year with my Monte Carlo analysis results. CSS spend was varying by quite a bit (up to $16k annual difference) from scenario to scenario even when all three scenarios were configured the same. I saw happen this again last week.
