Overview
 

Retirement Quant is a powerful financial tool for evaluating retirement strategies and comes in two versions.

• Personal Edition is used by individuals to analyze their own retirement plans.
   
• Professional Edition for planners and advisors has additional features designed to simplify working with clients. 

Retirement Quant features include:

• Straightforward entry of data and the facility to save different profiles (NEW)
• Unprecedented ability to use and define asset classes
  • Use 13 pre-defined asset classes, including TIPS, emerging markets, and gold
  • Enter your own investment and have historical data automatically retrieved
  • View the correlations between your investments and asset classes (NEW)
• The ability to create custom retirement decision rules for managing your portfolio:
  • Determine your initial retirement income level or withdrawal percent
  • Define your retirement income level in future years using one of six strategies (NEW)
  • Rebalance your portfolio every year or choose one of two other strategies
  • If your portfolio loses value, decide on one-year spending cuts or freeze at the prior year's level
  • If your withdrawal rate becomes too high, reduce your income
  • If your withdrawal rate becomes low, give yourself a raise
  • Set minimum and maximum retirement income levels
• Strategies the pros use
  • Pick from one of nine pre-defined strategies
  • Compare the effects of the different strategies with your own.
• Analysis of your current situation with cash flow and net worth statements
• Insightful graphs and charts to help analyze the data
• Powerful what-if analyses that will allow you to quickly:
  • Compare the effects of different portfolio asset allocations
  • Determine what retirement income level you can afford
  • See the effect of retiring at different ages
  • Get an idea of how much you will leave you heirs
  • See how sensitive your future is to different portfolio returns.
  • Analyze the conditions that can lead to failure (NEW)
• What-if analyses show your success rate and other risk factors
  • The age of the earliest simulated failure
  • Income and assets levels by confidence level
  • The standard deviation of your income (NEW)
  • Final income level and total retirement withdrawals by confidence level
  • Final legacy (estate) by confidence level
  • Statistics on the number of raises, freezes, and cuts to your income
  • Ability to track the amount of variance in your retirement income
• The ability to quickly adjust your retirement strategy and see the effect
• Use correlated returns, weighted portfolio returns, or independent returns
• Specify either standard normal return distributions or lognormal return (default) distributions

Retirement Quant works by running Monte Carlo simulations of your retirement.  Your lifetime is simulated 1000 times (you may increase this).  In each simulated year of your lifetime, inflation and portfolio returns are calculated.  A simulation is successful if, at the end of your lifetime, you have a positive asset balance, i.e. you don't run out of money.  Your success rate is computed as the percent of simulations which are successful.  The success rate and confidence levels, earliest failure, and other statistics can serve as useful information when considering the risk of a particular strategy.