Remove obsolete government pension question from LifeTime Planner Edit Pension dialog
I have Quicken Classic Deluxe 2026. I was told by Quicken phone support that I would have to submit an "idea" on this web site to get an answer to my question that follows...
In the Lifetime Planner Edit Pension dialog box, there are yes/no radio buttons to answer the question, "Is this a government pension?". Answering "yes" or "no" has a big impact on the value of my portfolio.
Quicken seems to use the answer to address the Government Pension Offset Act, which reduces the Social Security benefit by 2/3 for certain government pensions. But the Government Pension Offset Act was repealed in February of 2025 by the Social Security Fairness Act. So why is a 2026 version of Quicken still asking this "government pension" question and using the result? Thank you
Comments
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Because the Lifetime Planner hasn't been updated in many years. They haven't even updated it for the changes in the year the RMD needs to start being taken out.
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Thank you Chris, for the comment. I am a new Quicken user and hearing that Quicken isn't keeping the Lifetime Planner tool up to date is very concerning. I am only using Quicken for the Lifetime Planner tool and was hoping to use it to accurately calculate and plot (via the existing bar graph) available money over my retirement years so I can make important financial decisions. After seeing your comment, I started browsing through the concerns of other Quicken users about inaccuracies of the Lifetime Planner. I wonder if Quicken isn't giving this important tool the same importance as the other features of the product. That would be a real shame and significantly diminishes the usefulness of the overall Quicken product. Especially for retirees and people approaching retirement.
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The Lifetime Planner certainly has shortcomings, but remember that it is a planning tool and its predictions depend strongly on several factors that we can't predict with any certainty, such as:
- What will future tax rates be?
- What will inflation be?
- How will investments perform?
- How long will my spouse and I live?
Given these uncertainites, I think its predictions would be more useful if it did a Monte Carlo analysis, so you could get an idea of the relative likelihood of a range of outcomes.
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I think it would be extremely valuable to be able to save predictions and then be able to graph a past prediction to the current one. Given that one can be off on both the inflation number and returns, not to mention taxes and still get a "it works" if one is just looking at it from time to time and not at the details, they might not realize that the actual performance isn't anything like what they are predicting.
I even question if Quicken's Lifetime Planner is the best tool out there, but I have not really checked much. Its main advantage is that it can draw from the data that hopefully the user has got in Quicken. Other online tools have to try to get that information quickly from the user before they get bored and as such, they don't have as complete a data set.
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Windows 11 (2 separate computers)..... Quicken Premier.. HAVE USED QUICKEN CONTINUOUSLY SINCE 1985.
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