Why can I not die before age 67?
I am attempting to run a case with my current life insurance to check on my wife's standard of living if I die at various ages. 72 will be easy; I am having trouble with 62. I corrected my age of last withdrwal in the retirement folder as suggested.
The clue in the entry field says to check special expenditures and receipts. I do not know what to check. There is no identification of specials by spouse and most of the entries continue to hold in the event of my death.
Is there anything else that I need to adjust to be able to run a case of dying at age 62?
Thank you. Tag
RSS
Why doesn't running the survivor reports with you dieing at 62 get you what you want? Unless you want to have a very aggressive plan (in the sense you're likely to run out of money) or have some specific condition that guarantees you will die soon, you should run the basic part of ESPlanner with longer life spans.
However, we'll look at the basic stuff and see if we can't figure out why it won't let you kill yourself off before 67 (probably has something to do with Social Security at 67 is the full retirement year for most of the boomers).
Best,
Dick Munroe
You may be able to help me make sense of the scenario using the survivor reports. I think that the problems is the following:
1. ESPlanner says I need no insurance and therefore acts on the assumption that I have none.
2. I need to keep this insurance; it was part of the deal with my wife when I accepted my pension. I selected an option with no survivor benefit and then bought sufficient insurance to provide that survivor option.
3. To simulate having insurance, I have created my actual insurance payments in te special expenditures tab and will assume an insurance payout at age 62 ( current); 72 (one policy lapses) and 85 or so.
4. Since I have to assign a date to the insurance payout, I do not think the year by year insurance needs analysis by the program will produce the same result as one that specifically models the insurance payment at a specific age of death.
5. Other users have observed that it is best to create a special case to recreate a scenario like this one.
Hi Tag,
Here's how to handle this. Go to the estate screen and specify that you want your want your survivors to have a higher living standard if you die. Try different values until the recommended life insurance is the amount you actually hold.
This is a better way to handle this issue than using contingent special receipts.
If this is unclear, call me at 617 834-2148.
best, Larry
Thank you. That makes perfect sense and I will work on that next. I may have damaged my database with impatient clicking. I will try to reproduce last week's problem so that I can describe what is happening. That may take a few days if I do not get to it this morning.
Thank you for explaining a better work-around for my insurance issue.
Tag Van Winkle
I was able to find a percentage increase in living standard that equalized our living standards and reproduced the amount of insurance that I currently have. That value was 95%, which seems pretty high but it gave me a warm feeling that the life insurance decision was a good one. Congratulations on your premium model. It was within $50 of my actual premiums.
I am just about done with the foundational plan except for one more question. One of my policies, the larger one, expires in 11 years. Is there a way to model that scenario? It may be a wash. I will be 72 then and our model assumes that we both live to 100, so there will be fewer years to fund. On the other hand, if live as high as the current recommendation now, we may have to sharply curtail at age 73, when we may be ready to do so anyway. To get to the point, what is the best way to model this stepped insurance situation?
As for the database, it is acting balky. In making these changes to the Estate assumptions page, it sometimes would not let me enter anything. I would have to click around the page in other boxes and then go back before it would cooperate. Sometimes, when that did not work, I used the arrows in that field. Other times, I would make that change, tab a few times to hopefully get the change to register, go to another screen, come back, and the number would have reset to its previous value. Should I be concerned with the program's computational abilities if the data entry is acting erratically?
While data not getting saved is frustrating, it is only problematic in that the incorrect data is used. Let us know which fields you experience this on and we'll see if we can reproduce the problem
The field that I am experiencing trouble with is the "Desired percentage change in survivor's living standard" field on both sides of the first "Estate" screen.
One symptom is that I cannot tabl to that field and get the field to highlight, while I can do so for the last two fields on each side. I also cannot determine if there is an established tab order on that page. After the lower two fields get selected as I tab, I seem to be able to tab for minutes before the cursor returns to the page.
Can you also give me a hand with the question about modeling the result when the first insurance policy lapses at age 73?
Thank you.
Perhaps I have answered my own question. After running your database update this morning, I reran the case that replicates my current amount of life insurance. I asked in the last post how I could determine the appropriate consumption given that one of my policies lapses in 10 years.
The annual recommendation shows the amount of required life insurance by year. If the required life insurance according to ESPlanner is less than my projected amount of life insurance in force in a given year, that means that I will have sufficient life insurance to support my wife's survivor consumption level, is that right?
Thank you.