PROGRAM PURPOSE

Individuals considering retirement fall into one of three different fianancial categories:

1. Have lots of money, will live on interest and dividends, etc., and will leave all or most of their capital investments and savings to their heirs.

2. Have no money, or only fixed lifetime sources, such as Social Security, and lifetime pensions or annuities.

3. Those in-between, who have a limited amount of savings which they plan to spend during their retirement, leaving either nothing (or a pre-planned amount) to their heirs.

If you are in category 1 or 2, this program is not for you.

The purpose of this program is to assist those in category 3 who must spend all, or a major part, of their savings during their retirement years and who want to be able to plan those expenditures so that they will not run short of money before they die.

The program does this by developing data on the amount of money that will be available at retirement and then determining the amount that can be spent each month using input assumptions on retirement age and life expectancies.

Significantly, since inflation can become a large factor in such long time range calculations, the program also accounts for inflation - based upon user input assumptions.

The program then allows the user to build a budget based upon the results of the above.

A significant part of this budgeting process is the need to set aside reserves for items most people would not think to include in a budget.  (If you have 20 years of retirement, you may go through several cars, a new furnace, and will likely need a new roof on your house.)

Thus, while one certainly cannot accurately predict all of the variables, such as life expectancy, inflation rates, and the rate of return on invested retirement funds, the program allows the user to easily test out the results with varying input assumptions, and plan accordingly.  (The development of a plan, even if uncertain, is better than having no plan at all.)
 
Lastly, the program provides a simple bookkeeping approach to be sure that you live within your budget.  While most budgeting and check book accounting programs have excellent methods for tracking your expenditures AFTER you have made them, this program provides you with the electronic equivalent of your grandmother's Money Jars method - where she took the money from granddad's pay envelope and put money in separate jars labeled with her budget accounts to be sure that she would have the money to pay for various expenses BEFORE she made them.  (Again, even an uncertain - or changeable plan, is better than no plan at all.)

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