I'm trying to model a non-essential, phased expense (travel, specifically). I've got three phases - pre-retirement, early retirement, and later years.
When I mark it as essential, all the expenses in each phase show up in the plan - both at Build>Expenses>Phased Expenses>Projected Totals By Year and at Review>Expenses.
When I mark it as non-essential, the pre-retirement phase continues to show ... but everything later gets zeroed out (e.g., see the screenshot).
Even if I mark travel as essential I still have a 100% success rate (not a brag - I'm just getting started entering expenses!). So it doesn't seem like it's a question of being unable to fund those expenses. I just don't get why phased, non-essential expenses would produce this result.
@adamwiner All non-essential spending gets replaced b variable spending in your retirement years IF you have selected an alternate spending strategy. Does that explain it in your case?
Stuart
@adamwiner All non-essential spending gets replaced with variable spending in your retirement years IF you have selected an alternate spending strategy. Does that explain it in your case?
Stuart
@smatthews51 ah, that's exactly it, thanks. But I think this is confusing, at least to me. A couple of suggestions (all in the spirit of constructive feedback):
First, I didn't expect Analyze to affect results in Builds. Much of Pralana seems to be built around data flowing from left to right, and this goes "backwards". It would be useful to have something in the UI that explicitly notes "You've selected an alternate spending strategy, so post-retirement non-essential expenses are in variable spending"
Second, what would be much better is if the spending didn't just get lumped into variable spending. It'd be more useful if the alternate spending strategy resulted in a UI that continued to show non-essential expenses as fully funded if there was sufficient budget, and everything above that as variable spending, and a warning if non-essential expenses can't be funded. This would let me see the practical impact of alternate spending strategies.
That is, if I had a non-essential budget of $20k for travel, and an alternate spending strategy left me $30k of spending above essential needs, I'd want to see:
Travel: $20k
Variable: $10k
This tells me that I can do all the travel that I want, and still have $10k to play with. But if I had just $15k left over from my strategy, I'd want something like:
Travel: $15k WARNING
Variable $0k
Obviously, you'd need some heuristic for handling multiple non-essential budget items (scale them all down equally seems reasonable?). But this would give me a lot more information about the impact of alternate spending strategies on my budget than the current approach.
@adamwiner Hi Adam, and thanks for the feedback! I understand what you're saying and we'll give it careful consideration as we continue the refinement of Pralana Online.
Stuart
I have the exact same issue I think, I entered some non-essential expenses in Build->Phased Categories & Amounts, when I go to the "Projected totals by year" it shows mostly zeroes. In fact as I was building my plan it was showing zeroes for a range of years without explanations, and now that I went back to that section, it shows zeroes forever after retirement. If I set the spending strategy to "Specified Expenses Only" then the table reflects what I entered in the phases/amounts
Just like the previous poster, I wouldn't have expected a choice in the Analyze section to affect what is shown in the build section without some serious warnings. I entered a feedback bug earlier today as I had not found this thread yet and with the current level of explanation I still would consider it a "bug" in the workflow.
Unlike the previous poster, when I mark my non-essential expenses as essential, the MC simulation success rate goes down (albeit still acceptable but no-longer in the 90s)), so I would like to know where and how much the program chose to cut my non-essential spending. I guess according to the Build->Expenses->Phased Projected Totals by year tab, the program decided that I can spend 0 of my non-essential. The graphs or reports should really highlight that. If 95% success rate also means I can't spend any non-essential spending, I want to know, and I may decide to work a couple more years to afford that travel in "normal" market conditions
So for now I will mark all expenses as Essential and realize that a lower MC score means I may have to adapt as I go. I can't figure out how to get the tool to factor in non-essential expenses in a way that's useful to me.
Maybe a new graph showing spending as a stack of its components: house, healthcare, phased categories, maybe even taxes would at least highlight that non-essential is dropped or reduced
@diymaniac Thanks for this valuable feedback! You've made some good points and we're going to give them careful consideration as we continue to roll out enhancements to the tool.
Stuart
