If you are retired or are nearing retirement, the main questions on your mind are probably “Will I run out of money in retirement?” and “Will I be able to maintain my standard of living?” For answers, people often turn to free online retirement calculators, that calculate how much users will need to save to achieve their retirement objectives, based on details about their finances.
But how well do these calculators account for the inherent risks in retirement, such as how long you will live, how your investments will perform, what the inflation rate will be, and health care and long-term care costs? Not very well, according to a new study by the Pension Research Council.
“We conclude,” the study’s authors write, “that on the whole, the tools do not highlight nor address retirement risk particularly well; rather, they mainly mask risk.”
The authors, retirement experts Anna M. Rappaport and John A. Turner, reviewed the available research on five leading Web-based calculators to see how they handle post-retirement risks. The calculators they looked at were Fidelity’s Retirement Income Planner, AARP’s retirement planning calculator, MetLife’s calculator, the U.S. Department of Labor’s calculator and T. Rowe Price’s Retirement Income Calculator.
In their working paper “How Does Retirement Planning Software Handle Post-Retirement Realities?” Rappaport and Turner conclude that while the calculators “can provide a rough idea of whether the user is on target for retirement,” all inadequately assess the risk of running out of money.
*None treated expected medical and long-term care expenses as a risk factor or alerted users to the potentially huge impact such expenses could have on retirement plans.
Excerpts from Elder Law Answers
