ESPlanner revolutionizes financial planning. Traditional financial planning makes people set their own saving and life insurance targets. This is hard and, if people set their targets too low, dangerous. ESPlanner finds the right targets by doing life cycle consumption smoothing -- finding the most a person can spend today without suffering a drop in living standard tomorrow. ESPlanner not only calculates a family's highest sustainable living standard, it also determines the amounts of saving and life insurance it needs to maintain and protect that living standard through time. ESPlanner delivers its findings in the form of annual spending, saving, and insurance recommendations.Whether people are working or retired, maximizing and smoothing their household's living standard is not easy. Many factors are involved, including the household's composition, assets, earnings, retirement ages, housing expenses and plans, special expenditures, estate plans, pensions, tax-favored assets, federal and state income taxes, payroll taxes, Social Security retirement and survivor benefits, desired changes in living standard, economies in shared living, and borrowing constraints. ESPlanner considers these and a host of other factors, including contingent plans and the fact that survivors may have different needs and incomes. ESPlanner also lets individuals vary key inputs, such as the ages at which they will retire, collect Social Security retirement benefits, and start to withdraw tax-deferred assets, to determine how these choices affect their maximum sustainable living standard. Although its calculations are complex, ESPlanner's interface is user-friendly, and its recommendations are easy to follow.
- ISBN10 026252273X
- ISBN13 9780262522731
- Publish Date 1 December 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 20 May 2021
- Publish Country US
- Publisher MIT Press Ltd
- Imprint MIT Press
- Format Hardcover
- Language English