<edit: Added "Lifetime Planner" in title to add clarity and to improve search results>
How would you enter positive Social Security COLA? It only allows me to decrease my Social Security benifits?
(EDIT: Cross outs and added comments in italics.)
Are you talking about the SS benefit in the Retirement Income in Lifetime Planner?
If so, Lifetime Planner does not allow for a SSA COLA to be entered. Since the COLAs are not defined until the end of Nov or early Dec, when we get the new COLA information we need to manually calculate the new SS benefit amount and enter that amount. That or wait until we get the official next year benefit letter from the SSA in Dec. and then enter that amount .
Or we can calculate an estimate of the the SS benefit based upon the latest speculations floating around in the market.
Your other option would be to enter a SS COLA increase in Other Income. You would need to enter the calculated dollar amount, not the percentage amount, of the COLA. And you could set it up to be a recurring annual event. But I don't know how that might be factored into the Lifetime Planner calculations for income tax that might be due because of that. Given that Lifetime Planner assumes that future COLAs will be increased by the inflation rate that has been entered, I crossed out this paragraph because it would represent a duplication of COLAs (the Quicken calculated COLAs based on the inflation rate plus the estimated COLAs entered in Other Income) that would overstate future income.
Does this answer your question?
@jw_504 As @Boatnmaniac indicated you should enter the new SS benefit in Lifetime Planner (LTP) when it becomes available each year. In terms of how LTP calculates COLA for future years, the benefit you enter in Retirement Benefits is inflated (the COLA) by the value you estimated in the Inflation assumption.
You can see / confirm the result of this calculation if you turn your LTP results graph to "show results in future value" and click on a given (and future) year(s) in the graph to show the plan results table > social security benefits line.
It is interesting to note that there is an underline assumption that Quicken makes, and that is at best Social Security COLA will keep up with the assumed inflation or lag behind it. I would say that is a pretty good bet.
