housing equity and sale of house

I'll check this out today.

The Housing Equity column was missing from the PDF->Details->Housing report in the prior version (v 1.17 ). It's there now (v 1.18 ). Is this a source of confusion? Seems to be OK to me.

No - I am using version 2.11.0, not V1.17 or 1.18. The housing equity column exists, shows 0 with over 500k of equity. It no longer disposes of my principle residence in the year selected under First Change of home. It continues to pay taxes, maintenance, and costs me the equity I realize from the sale for adding to investment assets.
It doesn't work for me. No changes in inputs (other than Male / Female selection).

In addition, 500k in Housing Equity (market value - no mortgages) show 0 under net worth.

PDF version is at 1.18.
Uninstalled/reinstalled.
Housing equity shows 0 in housing report. Maint is constant at 2k, property tax increases with inflation, and does not consider the house to sell in 2010, altho' it shows in "first Change of Housing".
Net worth shows 0 for housing equity.
Please help.

I keep pre-emptively trying different things since you said that it does work.
I've deleted both homes, and reentered them.
I still have 0 housing equity, the home considered 0 in my net worth, I have to continue paying taxes and maintenance on my current home, even tho' the program correctly reports the First change in housing on the PDF report.
The Excel reports match the PDF reports.

I tried (for giggles) adding a 12 dollar mortage (1 year, 1 dollar a month) to each property. Housing equity still shows 0, but when the PDF report is generated, only the Inputs and Assumptions section is there.

I've been able to repeat with predictable results at this point. Very odd.
ESP Basic Plus
CE Engine ESPBASIC VERSION 2.00.p00-00
ID:3 ESPlanner Basic Plus Version 2.11.0
Win XP 5.1 2600
DB compat w/ version 2.6.0 or later

This is a bug and has been fixed. A new update will be available shortly. This managed to sneak through my testing regime somehow.

My apologies,

Dick Munroe

You have a need for any more testers? I have 20+ years in IT (not in QC, but know how to beat up software :-) )

Despite the occasional issue, ESPlanner is by far the most useful piece of financial planning software I've ever had the pleasure to use. With early retirement on the near horizon, you've helped confirm / tweak our plans!!

Steve

Steve, I agree with you that ESPlanner is a great program but over the last 16 months that I've been using the program, sometimes when I updated to an improved version my recommended consumption & standard of living change significantly without any change to my data. How can I determine that the results from the latest version are valid for planning purposes? Has anyone setup a "test family" that has validated the program? How does the ESPlanner team validate each modification? Why are these bugs not getting caught? Can the user base help the team in validating the modifications? I'm ready to help. I need this program, but I need it to provide accurate data! In financial planning, I think bad data is worse than no data.

James

james300 at pacbell.net wrote:Steve, I agree with you that ESPlanner is a great program but over the last 16 months that I've been using the program, sometimes when I updated to an improved version my recommended consumption & standard of living change significantly without any change to my data. How can I determine that the results from the latest version are valid for planning purposes? Has anyone setup a "test family" that has validated the program? How does the ESPlanner team validate each modification? Why are these bugs not getting caught? Can the user base help the team in validating the modifications? I'm ready to help. I need this program, but I need it to provide accurate data! In financial planning, I think bad data is worse than no data.

James
James,

Frequently the changes are a consequence of changes in tax law. Sometimes [rarely] these changes are due to the fixing or introduction [more rarely] of bugs. In some cases, the changes are a consequence of considering something additional (for example, Medicare B expenses) that were not taken into account in prior versions. Sometimes these changes are a consequence of a different consideration of what is "reasonable" economically. A good example is how we treat state taxes for states which explicitly do not index their brackets by the inflation rate. At one point ESPlanner never re-indexed those states. Now it does (at a set point in the future). This changed substantially the state tax effect on consumption. Sometimes the underlying planning data gets updated (we update mortality tables, all the various monte carlo data, all the social security data, etc. yearly).

So ESPlanner is a dynamic model of the future and a very complex one in which we have only limited abilities to predict. I can't tell you how many times Larry and I have sat down and gone over the code step by step when he's seen a result that his intuition tells him is unreasonable only to find that, indeed, the results are correct [assuming that our interpretation of statute is correct].

Bottom line, the numbers you get are the best ones we can give you and, to the best of our abilities, "good". When they aren't and, sometimes, they aren't, then we examine the problems whenever we hear about them (from the forum, via the support phone line, or from emails to eval(unescape('%64%6f%63%75%6d%65%6e%74%2e%77%72%69%74%65%28%27%3c%61%20%68%72%65%66%3d%22%6d%61%69%6c%74%6f%3a%69%6e%66%6f%40%65%73%70%6c%61%6e%6e%65%72%2e%63%6f%6d%22%3e%69%6e%66%6f%40%65%73%70%6c%61%6e%6e%65%72%2e%63%6f%6d%3c%2f%61%3e%27%29%3b'))). Again, I can't tell you the number of times that we've looked at code only to find that the results are correct, even if weird.

We keep looking though because it's possible for us to make mistakes and only by continual examination can we vet what's there.

Best,

Dick Munroe

Dick,

In version 2.11.1, housing equity does show up in the PDF report under Recommendations. However, it is missing, shows zero value, in the Inputs & Assumptions Net Worth table.

Thanks
James

Hi!
My primary home is not sold when I move to my vacation home in 2010 again! If I buy a 2nd primary for one dollar with 100% down payment it does sell.

Why?

Over $500,000 of housing equity appears on the net worth page of the PDF report as 0.
Why?

In the next couple of weeks my first year of license will be up, and I fear that without paying for additional support, I'll be left with a program that I cannot rely on for my planning. I've already sent my PDF report and database a while ago.

I've been seeing the same issues with purchase/sale of homes, too, and was looking forward to this revision. Unfortunately, the latest update, version 2.11.2A, still ignores the purchase and sale of a vacation home and the future sale of our primary home.

When do you expect to have these errors resolved?

Yeah, there were a couple of problems with the reporting and particular combinations of housing sales that have been cleared up. If you aren't running the latest and greatest update (2.11.2 with CE version 2.00.p03-02 or later) then upgrade. If there are still problems, please upload your database (instructions are in the FAQ) along with details on how to reproduce the problem and we'll take a look.

Best,

Dick Munroe

I saw the note regarding Version 2.11.2B (ES Planner BasicPlus) saying it "Fixes housing bug". However, I installed this version and it did not fix the issue I reported earlier.

My scenario with regard to first and second home, which seemed to work fine with ES Planner BasicPlus version 2.10.24, is as follows

a) "Current Housing" ==> have primary home w/mortgage, but no second home

b) "First Housing Change" later in 2008 ==> purchase a second home, and keep primary home

c) "Second Housing Change" in 2014 ==> sell second home, and keep primary home

In version 2.10.24 the above scenario seemed to work fine (except the state where second home is located doesn't seem to be adjustable). The housing reports in the PDF and the EXCEL output would show the purchase and sell dollars.

In version 2.11.2B this above scenario for a second home are simply not recognized, so no purchase or sell are recorded in the "housing data yearly table" and the associated down payment funds and sells input are not recorded in the "regular assests data yearly table".

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Earlier e-mail I sent to eval(unescape('%64%6f%63%75%6d%65%6e%74%2e%77%72%69%74%65%28%27%3c%61%20%68%72%65%66%3d%22%6d%61%69%6c%74%6f%3a%69%6e%66%6f%40%65%73%70%6c%61%6e%6e%65%72%2e%63%6f%6d%22%3e%69%6e%66%6f%40%65%73%70%6c%61%6e%6e%65%72%2e%63%6f%6d%3c%2f%61%3e%27%29%3b')) on 5/26/08

In March of 2008 I set up a "what if" scenario in ES PlannerPlus Ver 2.10.24A that had me purchasing a second home this year (2008) and it seemed to work fine. The "Net Home Purchases" column in the table on "Housing" showed the purchase and sell of this second home as I had indicated.

This weekend I renewed my licenses and upgraded to ES PlannerPlus 2.11.1 and the software does not seem to recognize this "second home purchase/sell" in the "Housing" table results for either the "PDF" or "EXCEL" results output. However, in the inputs shown it the "PDF" file the "first change in housing" and "second change in housing" tables correctly display the input I was trying to get results from (except for the State where this home is located). Clearly, this Version 2.11.1 has issues that need to be corrected on this topic, and who knows what other topics.

While I'm on the subject, the how can I change the State where the second home is located ?

Further, numerous figures in the "PDF" file created continue to contain results that do not match what the tabular data results states. From this observation it seems obvious that more rigorous Software Quality Assurance checks are needed before you post new releases of this software? With these obvious errors not caught, the reasonable prudent person should be scared that other more difficult to find errors are scattered throughout this software!

I'm using this software to help guide my "retirement planning" decisions as I believe that is the purpose of this software, and I'm now becoming very worried that maybe it is not prudent to use this software for any purpose due to the apparant lack of quality control.