Lifetime Planner Development Suggestion

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QMHS
QMHS Member ✭✭

My suggestion is to create a reporting facility for the Lifetime Planner (Retirement Forecasting).

The recently added reporting feature of a Lifetime Overview (focusing on past performance) could be used as a basis for this reporting feature.

Along those lines, the planner should also be updated to account for the recent changes in the law addressing RMD's for deferred accounts.

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  • Scooterlam
    Scooterlam SuperUser, Windows Beta Beta
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    Can you elaborate on how you would use the Lifetime Overview Report (past incomes/expenses et al) to forecast in the future? In this proposed report how would you distinguish the various, past income categories and extrapolate what was income earmarked for past expenses and what should be forecasted for future expenses post retirement? Can you add some color to your idea?

    FWIW: Here are a number of Lifetime Planner reporting ideas for you to consider as well. For sure, LTP is below par when it comes to presenting results.

    REPORT, PRINT AND EXPORT PLAN RESULTS - updated 01.04.22

  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
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    I have looked at the "Lifetime Overview" report and wish they would have used a different name, because people are instantly going to start comparing it to the Lifetime Planner, and it isn't going to work. More directly for this suggestion I wouldn't want it to be the basis for a report for the Lifetime Planner. The two have only the slightest correlation. If one was to cram all what is in the Lifetime Planner into only what is in the Lifetime Overview report format, you would lose a lot of information.

    There is a feature, that I have asked for at times (and given up on) and that is recording what the past predictions were and have a comparison to that for the past part of the planner. Right now, I could predict an inflation of 0%, return on investment 20%, … and it will certainly graph that out. But what if my predictions on these are wrong? When will I know that? Well, unless you print out what the final prediction for the year was and compare it at the end of the year, you will never know that you are wrong, until you are wildly off.

    So, of course the first thing I did when I looked this is ask if this might somehow fit into that idea. Well, in the Lifetime Planner, "expenses" are the ones not in taxes, …., but they are all lumped together in the report, because it has no idea about this kind of separation. And if you go through and just add up these from the Planner and they are different, you have a lot of digging to find out what is different. This goes for other parts of the Planner too.

    To really be useful the reporting has to have the same formatting/grouping as the Lifetime Planner.

    To me the Lifetime Overview report is "nice", like a net worth report "expanded", but it has very little that lines up with what the Lifetime Planner is doing.

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  • QMHS
    QMHS Member ✭✭
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    I appreciate both responses very much. My intent was to initiate a discussion to signal interest to Intuit for such an improvement, not necessarily create an identical report. Like you, I have been waiting for a "report version" of the Lifetime Planner instead of the very limited annual snapshot currently available. You are correct; to really be useful the reporting must have the same formatting/grouping as the Lifetime Planner.

    The basic idea was to create a more extensive reporting feature with a focus on the Lifetime Planner data as projected by the user. Then add some modeling options (i.e., Monet Carlo) to allow for some reasonable forecasting and retirement planning. Additionally, it should have features to account for the correct interpretation of current tax laws affecting the projections related to retirement planning, possibly grabbing it from Turbo Tax.

    …let’s hope Intuit can add such functionality eventually.

  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2023
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    Just so you know Intuit hasn't owned Quicken for years.

    Also, I just saw in another thread that the suggestion to change the RMD date to the right date for the current laws has been removed, with them saying that any changes to the Lifetime Planner are at least a year away because there is no longer anyone that understands that code:

    This seems to be a pattern with Quicken. Basically, it has a lot of old features, so it can be called "feature rich", but it also means that there are a lot of neglected features, that they either don't have enough people to support them, or over time they have lost key people/knowledge on how things work.

    EDIT: I forgot I was going to say, so to compensate for the lack of knowledge in a given area, they have tried resort to put in features that might work, but in a way that isn't what people expect. This is safer since they are touching code that they don't know how it works. Another example of this is when instead of changing the investment register to be able to do multiple select, they bring up a separate window where you do multiple select on the transactions.

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  • QMHS
    QMHS Member ✭✭
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    …that certaily provides some insight…thnx for providing the link to RMD discussion…I guess we will have to wait.

  • QMHS
    QMHS Member ✭✭
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    …following the links of scooterlam…thats the idea!

  • Scooterlam
    Scooterlam SuperUser, Windows Beta Beta
    edited November 2023
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    Good to hear. Don't forget to vote on the ones you like.