Including tax-deferred accounts in smoothing - a possible third way
I read with great interest the posts from last spring on the effect of the constant withdrawal rates for tax-deferred accounts on consumption smoothing.
If I read correctly, you have most of the code in place in the CE to employ the tax-deferred accounts in consumption smoothing, but running such an analysis would be unsatisfactory because of computation time. (I am a programmer and I understand what it means for a problem to be computationally expensive and how that impacts the user experience.)
So here's my suggestion, or maybe it's a question. Could you treat this the same way you treat another computationally expensive report, the Monte Carlo simulation? If you did, a user could choose to run a regular report, a Monte Carlo report, or a "tax-deferred-smoothing" report. (Not a catchy name, I know.)
For many people, running the regular report will produce a satisfactorily smooth outcome and running the slower tax-deferred report would not be needed. But for others, like us, ES will provide even more help when all assets are employed in the smoothing process.
(BACKGROUND: Here's why I say ES would help us more if it could do this. Like a lot of federal employees, most of our savings is tied up in the government Thrift Savings Plan "TSP". We liquidated most of our regular assets to build a vacation home in Canada. Now, as I approach retirement at age 60 this year, practially all of the funds available to smooth consumption are in TSP. The ES report is helpful in many ways, but it doesn't do much smoothing over the near term in my case. In particular, it is difficult to run comparisons of taking SS early or late, because there is nothing available except the TSP to fill the money hole if I take SS late.)
RSS
No, we have none of the code in place to use the tax deferred accounts for consumption smoothing. It's doable with a thorough redesign of the way we handle retirement account withdrawals and a substantial increase in compute time for both the basic and monte carlo modules.
Yes, we could make it optional but that's not the issue, resources are.
Best,
Ah, I misread the earlier post entirely. It says: "Well the infrastructure for doing arbitrary withdrawals from retirement accounts is in place in the CE." I thought that referred to using those for consumption smoothing. Now I understand it refers to manually entered arbitrary withdrawals.
So, as Rosanna Rosannadanna would say: "Never mind..."
PS: I understand resources are an issue, but I thought speed of calculation was also a concern. If you implement this some time in the future, but still find it too slow for everyday use, making it optional would make it at least available.
Now that's different, that IS in place but it's not automatic. In other words, were the user interface available you could specify withdrawals from your retirement account in any desired manner, e.g., start at 1000/month for 10 years, move up to 2000/month for 10 years, then smoothly after that. However ESPlanner would not adjust those spending levels for you via the consumption smoothing algorithms. It would (does) enforce the MDR rules but other than that you're on your own.
As I understand it (and not being an economist that qualification has to be taken seriously) the reason the basic computations are so fast is that there is actually only one state variable involved, cash on hand; retirement account withdrawals are an exogenous contribution to cash on hand during the smoothing process. The consumption/insurance dynamic programs push each other around a bit to get the actual consumption numbers but that's a relatively fast process. Were we to introduce the retirement accounts into the smoothing process, the number of state variables goes up, the basic performance would approach that of the current monte carlo implementation and the monte carlo implementation would move towards glacial.
Yes, all that could be made optional and all of the above is possible to do, maybe even fast enough to be useful, but as I said earlier, its a matter of resources. We have lower hanging fruit that we have to pick first.
Best,
Dick Munroe