Retirement planner

This little calculator is a retirement planner designed to explore optimial withdraws from savings and IRA accounts. It uses a Linear Programming solution to maximize the minimum amount of money available to spend. As a side effect it minimizes the taxes that needs to be spent.

This is similar to the ideas of James Welch at www.i-orp.com but I wanted to explore some new ideas. ORP continues to be a much more complete tool. This version is mainly aimed at people who retire well before age 59.5.

Currently modeled

• aftertax, IRA and Roth spending
• IRA->Roth conversions
• Federal income tax on IRA spending with 2017 tables
• Simplistic capital gains, assuming an average cost basis, at a fixed 15%
• Roth withdraw limitations before age 59
• Early IRA withdrawals have a 10% penalty. (this is added to 'tax')
• inflation
• Required Minimum Distributions from IRA
• Arbitrary income or expenses happening at certain years. Income can be taxed or not. This is used to model Social Security
• IRA 72(t) withdrawals

Not modeled yet

• Early withdrawals from Roth gains are not modeled (only contributions)
• Recording when existing Roth contributions can be accessed in config file

Not modeled

• Any other taxes
• new contributions to IRA or Roth

Assumptions

• Taxes are only for Married filing jointly at the moment
• Only the standard deduction for 2 people
• age 59 is assumed to be past 59.5

Installing

This program is written in Python and can be installed locally with pip install --user ..

I am new to Python packaging so hints to make this easier for people are appreciated

Usage

• Copy sample.toml to a new file
• Edit with your information
• run fplan NEW.toml

Output

The output is a table by age with the following columns. All numbers in table are in 1000s of dollars.

• save: amount in after-tax savings account
• send: send from savings this year
• IRA: balance of tax-deferred IRA acount
• fIRA: amount to pull from IRA this year. (before 59 with penalty)
• Roth: balance of tax-exempt Roth account
• fRoth: amount to pull from Roth this year
• IRA2R: money converted from the IRA to Roth this year
• rate: US tax bracket this year
• tax: tax spent this year (includes IRA 10% penlty)
• spend: net amount spent this year (includes income)
• extra: additional spending this year

Contact

This tools has been somewhat on the back burner for a couple years. That said, I am more than happy to help people to use it and understand the results. Send mail at Wayne wsc9tt@gmail.com or file issues on github.

Developer Information

Testing

The test directory contains test scripts to exercise the various subsystems. Run python -m pytest to launch all of the tests.