Gold'N Years Retirement Funds Analysis (v3) Copyright (C), 1996, Maristream, Inc.; All Rights Reserved. Maristream, Inc. 2015 Franklin Street N. Little Rock, AR 72114 (501) 758-7482 Will you retire a millionaire? Or, if you are like most folks, do you not even have any idea how much you will have to live off of after retirement? If you are not sure if your golden years will be in the red or in the black, well, this is the program for you! Gold'N Years is a retirement funds analy- sis program that projects how much your 401 (K)'s, IRA's, and other funds will be worth when you retire, and how much you will get back from them each year during your retirement. Besides tracking your current investments, you can also use Gold'N Years to try out other funds and mixtures of funds that you are considering investing in for your retirement, and see what effect they have on that future income. I must warn you first, though, playing around with different scenarios using Gold'N Years is kindof addicting! And, don't get depressed if you learn that your current retirement contributions won't even put food on the table when you retire - at least now you will be able to determine what you need to do to fix this problem before your retirement party takes place, assuming that you have the time to do so. You might even discover that you are in pretty good shape, and that you don't have to keep putting so much into your retire- ment accounts to look forward to a comfortable retirement financially. But, be aware that the past performance of funds does not mean that they will make similar returns in the future, so neither Gold'N Years nor any of the fund professionals can make any guarantees, unless you put your funds into fixed return instruments, such as savings bonds, where the returns are usually much lower. You must determine what level of risk that you can stand to take with your money in order to potentially receive higher returns on your retirement funds. One rule of thumb that I've heard is that you should have a percentage equal to 100 minus your age in stocks or stock mutual funds, and the rest in fixed return accounts. The closer you get to retirement, the harder you will have to look at how much risk you are willing to take with the funds that you have accumulated for your retirement, especially if you are within 5 years of your retirement date. Gold'N Years was developed as a DOS-based application to allow it to run on most PC's, from 286's on up, in 450K of base memory. Although it was created as a spreadsheet, you DO NOT NEED a spreadsheet program such as Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro to run it. Gold'N Years is distributed as shareware, so, when you find it useful after your free evaluation period, as I hope that you will, please send in your payment of $10 for continued use of it (if you did not purchase it directly from me) to let me know that my effort on it was worth it to you as a future millionaire. Information used in calculating your retirement includes: 1) Your current age and age at retirement. 2) Your current salary base. 3) Your contribution (including matching employer contribution) to the funds, as a percentage of your base salary. 4) Cost Of Living Adjustments (including raises) anticipated, as a percentage of your base salary. 5) The estimated inflation rate (defaulting to the historical 3.59%). 6) Information on up to five funds, including: a) The fund name, b) The current value of the fund at the beginning of the base year, c) The percentage of your contribution going to that fund, and d) The historical percentage return of the fund (10 years is best). Gold'N Years shows you what each fund will be worth at your retirement, given the historical percentage returns of the funds and your ongoing percentage contributions to the funds with cost of living increases, and includes a breakdown per year of each fund's contributions and returns, which can be modified on a per-year basis to cover special case years and anticipated changes in contributions. It also gives you five retirement payout scenarios and what they are worth relative to your baseline salary year, so you can determine if what you are contributing and what returns you are making will be able to support you and your household during retirement. These scenarios include: 1) Disbursement of earnings only, leaving the principal untouched, based on the continued historical returns of the individual funds (which shouldn't be done after age 70.5, or you will be socked by a 50% under-payment penalty by the IRS (USA)). 2) Payout over N years (such as 20 years) of the earnings and principal, based on the continued historical returns of the individual funds. 3) Payout over N years of the earnings and principal, based on a given single percentage return for the monies in all of the funds at retirement, if you want to roll them over to a single interest bearing account. 4) Payout over each of N years of the earnings and principal with cost of living adjustments based on the inflation rate, given a single percentage return for the monies in all of the funds at retirement. 5) Payout over each of N years of the earnings and principal with cost of living adjustments based on the inflation rate, with earnings based on the continued historical returns of the individual funds. With this information, you will be able to keep up with your own funds yourself, and do your own "what if" analysis, without having to call up your brokers to have them calculate it for you. Note that these are projected estimates only, and your brokers may be able to give you more accurate information, especially on disbursements, where they can factor in the ever-changing tax codes and other regulations, along with payments from Social Security (which averages 27% of income needed at retirement) and other governmental programs, into your retirement income. INSTALLING GOLD'N YEARS If you received Gold'N Years on a floppy disk: 1) Insert the floppy disk into your A drive, 2) Type A:, and 3) Type INSTALL This will install Gold'N Years into the C:\GOLDNYRS directory on your PC. If you need to install it from floppy drive B, change step 2 above to B: instead of A:. If you need to install it to a different directory, change step 3 above to include the full directory name after INSTALL, including the disk drive letter, such as INSTALL D:\GOLDNYRS. If you received Gold'N Years as a .ZIP file: 1) Make a directory for it using the MD command, such as MD C:\GOLDNYRS, 2) Type CD C:\GOLDNYRS (or whatever directory name you created), and 3) Type PKUNZIP GOLDNYRS.ZIP (prefixing the .ZIP file with whatever directory it is in). (PKUNZIP is not included with Gold'N Years.) RUNNING GOLD'N YEARS To run Gold'N Years, assuming that it is in the C:\GOLDNYRS directory: 1) Type CD C:\GOLDNYRS (or whatever directory it is in), and 2) Type GOLDNYRS (or GOLDNYRS yourfile, for a specified file) This will bring up the Gold'N Years title screen and load the GOLDNYRS.WKB data file. Press the Enter key after the data file has finished loading to show the file and work with it. If you have saved your previous work to another file, press / F G (File Get) and type in the name of that file to retrieve it. The slash key (/) switches you to the list of menus at the top of the screen. Pressing the highlighted keys in those menu items brings up other menu items or data entry fields or screens so you can make changes to those system values and perform other functions. You can also press the arrow keys after switching to the menus to go from item to item. Pressing the ESCape key or the Q key (to quit), where available, in those sub menus takes you back up or out of the menus. You can also use your mouse to click on the menu items and sub items to select them. Press F1 for Help. Some important menu functions include / F S (File Save), to save the changes you have made to your file, / Q (Quit) to quit Gold'N Years after confirming that you really want to do this, and / P P G (Print Printer Go) to print this spreadsheet with the current settings, which default to a laser printer with 60 lines per page on LPT1. You can also press the F2 key after / P P to make changes to the screen of printer settings in mass, using the Tab key to go from field to field, and pressing Enter to change the field or select one of the choices. The Range can be set to A3..AT89 for the entire spreadsheet, A3..E22 for the data entry screen, AE20..AT71 for the yearly payouts with COLA, A14..T26 for the funds and payment breakdowns, and A28..AC71 for the yearly contribution breakdowns. Do / P P P (Print Printer Page) between printouts to start at the top of the page. You can also hold down the Alt key and press the F1 key, etc., to print the matching areas or combinations listed on the bottom line (the flashes you may see are the macro menu calls). When doing a File Save, you might want to save the file to a different .WKB file than the default GOLDNYRS.WKB file. That way, you can easily start with a fresh file as needed by bringing up the original .WKB file and saving it with a different name, or use the File Get command to pull up your modified file. You can also keep multiple .WKB files around for yourself and others to bring up as needed. The remaining menu items are described on the screen as you highlight or arrow between those items. When you are in the main data screen, you can use the arrow keys to move around in the screen. The Tab key takes you to the right one screen page. The Shift-Tab key combination takes you the the left one screen page. The Page Down key takes you down one screen page. The Page Up key takes you up one screen page. You can also use your mouse to click on any of the data cells that you want to change, instead of arrowing to them. Any value that is highlighted in the data screen can be changed as needed. Gold'N Years will immediately update all of the other values on the screen that are affected by that value. The only exception to this is the detail grid of individual year payouts, for which you have to press the Alt-C combination to recalculate when any data changes are made that affect it. Some of the values in the data screen are actually mathematical formulas instead of fixed numeric values. If you type a value into one of these data cells, you can later on revert back to the formula by arrowing to or clicking on that cell, press / R D (Range Deoverride), and pressing Enter. Overridden formula cells are indicated by values displayed in yellow. If you type into those cells a second time, the value will be displayed in white, but / R D will still bring back the formula. ENTERING YOUR FUND INFORMATION When you first start using Gold'N Years, arrow down to the data cell to the right of the Current Age string and type in your current age. Similarly, type in your Retirement Age, your current Baseline Salary (without commas), the Percentage Contribution of your salary going into your funds each year (including the decimal point, such as .10 for 10%), the Cost Of Living Adjustment percentage (including raises) that you anticipate throughout your career, and the estimated long-term Inflation rate, if other than 3.59%. Arrow down to the Fund Name column and type in the names of the various funds that you are in for up to five funds. Arrow over to the right to the Initial Balance column and type in the current amounts that you have in your funds at the beginning of the current baseline year. Arrow over to the right to the Percent Allocation column and type in the percentage of your contribution that is going into each of the funds, which must all add up to 100%. Arrow over to the right to the Average Return column and type in the historical percentage returns that the funds have made over the longest time period that you have information available for (10 years is probably best). The block of Resulting Payouts Options will change automatically as you enter these values to reflect your retirement payments. Finally, press Alt-C to calculate the resulting individual year payout values. You can now move around in the data screen and page left, right, up, and down, or use the function keys, to see the results of your contributions, including accumulations, disbursements, and yearly breakdowns of your contributions to each of the funds and their individual accumulations (total values) at retire- ment. You can change any of the highlighted values, such as making different percent contributions from year to year, with some of the changes, such as salary changes, being projected to subsequent years. The retirement disburse- ments are also shown relative to the baseline year (adjusted in reverse for inflation) so that you can compare what you will get at retirement versus what you are getting in the baseline year. In order to have the most accurate picture of your funds, you should change the baseline current age and salary values at the beginning of each year so that the baseline year is always the current year, and also change the fund initial balances to reflect the beginning-of-year amounts. You should also change the average return percentages as often as your funds provide this information, or as you find this information through magazines or other sources. Many financial magazines, such as Mutual Funds, Money, and Forbes, provide lists of funds and their returns at various times of the year, especially around February, and will also give you additional insight into investing and fund selection. Enjoy the hunt!