Appendix E
The Genesis of the Rhino Retirement Analyzer (and this Book)
A few years ago, as I was contemplating retirement, I perused a lot of financial advice for people in my situation. One of the mainstays of personal financial retirement advice is that you should always take money out of your accounts “in a tax-efficient manner”. While this is obviously true, merely telling people to do something doesn’t give them the tools they need to follow that advice. After a fairly thorough search of available resources, I couldn’t find anything that even claimed to allow a layman to convert this general recommendation into actionable advice.
Fortunately, I’m a software developer with some knowledge of financial matters, so I decided to take a crack at that problem myself, on the theory that if I needed such a tool, others would need it as well.
However, as I began the development process, it became clear that the scope of the project was far beyond my original conception. Once I decided to add analysis of the effects of term life insurance, I discovered how significant those effects could be. At that point, I decided to become a life insurance agent, so that I could help married couples in or near retirement avoid that worst-case scenario of one spouse dying early in retirement and leaving the survivor (usually the widow) a long time at a very low standard of living due to the loss of the second Social Security payment.
Then I got an email from the editor of some of my previous books (on computer programming) asking if I had any ideas for writing another book. I suggested a book on what I had found out about retirement income security. After some discussion, he agreed that a book on this topic would fit into the product line of his new publisher. This book is the result of that agreement.
So what does the resulting program, now called the Rhino Retirement Analyzer, do?
A General Description of the Current Version of the Program
The Rhino Retirement Analyzer is a program that estimates the sustainable spending level for a married couple and the surviving spouse after the first spouse dies. It relies on a number of assumptions about federal income taxes, Social Security rules, and other financial variables that can and will change, so the results are and must be estimates, not actual results that can be relied on as calculated. Of course, the same caveats apply to any forecasting or estimating method that attempts to model future events, as no one knows what the actual laws and regulations will be in the future, nor does anyone know exactly when he or she will die.
However, the fact that we don’t know exactly how the future will play out does not mean that estimating future events has no value. On the contrary, without trying to estimate future results, we are flying completely blind. The Rhino Retirement Analyzer provides a view of what might happen, which is the best anyone can do. Its results, while not guaranteed, are very helpful in determining whether one’s retirement plans are feasible or must be scaled back if one wants a high probability of having sufficient retirement savings to sustain planned spending.
In the event that you are a licensed insurance agent who would be interested in a custom version of the program described in this book (the Rhino Retirement Analyzer), please contact me at [email protected] for a quotation on such customization. If, on the other hand, you are a financial planner without an insurance license, you may be interested in the fact that at this writing, I have licenses to sell life insurance and fixed annuities in the following states: AZ, CA, FL, IA, OH, MI, PA, VA, and TX. I’d be happy to help your clients in those states insure their retirement income.