New version 0.2 of the FI Simulator released

I have received a lot of feedback about the first version of the simulator, thanks a lot for that! Some of it has already been incorporated into the new version, which is “live” since today. Here is a first compact overview of all new features:

1. all inputs of an analysis incl. pensions and cash flows can now be saved and also loaded again. For a transitional period, the load function still accepts the previous csv files, which only contains the cash flows. In the future, however, only the new JSON format will be supported because it is much more flexible.
2. in the simulation you can now define a start month of the simulation explicitly. Until now, this was always the current month and this will continue to be set as default. Besides the possibility to start simulations e.g. at the beginning of the year, I want to make the results of saved analyses exactly reproducible. If, for example, cash flows were included in certain future points in time, the exact withdrawal rates always depend a little on the start month due to discounting effects.
3. the FI date can now be set not only as a “slider” in whole years, but also to the exact month. This allows an even finer “tuning” of a possible retirement time window.
4. the selection mask has been tidied up and centralized a bit, this also has to do with the clean saving of the input parameters, among other things.
5. the input of pensions is now more flexible via a table and therefore no longer limited to just two pensions. All pensions are still adjusted for inflation.
6. for other cash flows, an additional flag “inflation adjustment” can now be set to enable further cash flows that adjust to inflation. Candidates for this could be e.g. rental income, if the contracts allow for this. In sum, this should make it possible to “model” even more complex situations in the simulator.
7. the new column unfortunately leads to an error message when loading “old” csv cashflows due to the still missing column there. Please set the values of this column manually after loading, after re-saving as JSON file the problem does not appear anymore.
8. Another note: The percentage increase in the cash flows has now been defined internally as a percentage. Unfortunately, this has the consequence that loaded cashflows may show values that are too high by a factor of 100. Please check this after loading and change manually if necessary. After saving again in the new JSON format, the problem does not occur anymore.
9. in the tab “Stock Market Data Tuning” there is an additional parameter that allows filtering historical scenarios according to the CAPE value at that time. If you start retirement in a rather “weak” stock market phase, the risk of stronger price drops is naturally smaller at the beginning. This can be simulated by setting this parameter accordingly and may then allow somewhat higher “safe” withdrawal rates. Due to the complexity of this topic, there will be a dedicated article on that in the future.
10. The biggest optical change concerns the graphs showing the portfolio development in the first tab. In addition to median, minimum and maximum, I have now added the curves for the 1st and 3rd quantile, i.e. these curves bound 25% and 75% of the historical cases, respectively. This ultimately made the boxplot on this page dispensable, because it hardly contained any additional information. Thus, both graphs could be made a bit larger and also the performance should be (slightly) better with this.
11. last but not least, the concrete historical start cohort is now displayed in the legend, i.e. a manual back calculation is no longer necessary.

I hope you will like the new features and I already look forward to further feedback and suggestions. If you want to be notified about new posts, please use your favorite RSS reader and subscribe to this blog using the RSS link in the main navigation bar or through this link.