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Monster Media 1996 #15
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Monster Media Number 15 (Monster Media)(July 1996).ISO
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goldnyr2.zip
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README.TXT
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Gold'N Years Retirement Funds Analysis (v2)
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.
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 four 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 X years (such as 20 years) of the earnings and principal,
based on the continued historical returns of the individual funds.
3) Payout over X 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 X 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.
With this information, you will be able to keep up with your own funds your-
self, 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 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 salary) and other governmental programs, into your retirement
income. However, I compared an estimate of my retirement income from my
provider to Gold'N Years' results, and found that Gold'N Years was within
2% of what they had calculated.
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). You may need to use UNZIP instead of PKUNZIP,
depending on which of those programs that you have. (PKUNZIP and
UNZIP are 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..AH89 for the entire spreadsheet,
A3..E22 for the data entry screen, AE21..AH71 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.
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 you can still use / R D to 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. 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
to see the results of your contributions, including accumulations, disburse-
ments, and yearly breakdowns of your contributions to each of the funds and
their individual accumulations (total values) at retirement. 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 disbursements 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!