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Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

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Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#31

Post by nhootan »

fusslo wrote: post #19

huh, yesterday I vibe coded a similar tool. It lets me set my current savings, investment, retirement. Expected yearly savings, expected number of years of work left. After retirement, only withdrawals are allowed (investments, savings still get returns tho) Codex suggested a bunch of improvements: monte carlo, investment volatility, expense inflation, capital gains tax etc. One thing codex didn't ask about was socia…

Your last paragraph is why I did using MC simulations based on credible data. Once you pick a return and a volatility, the output just restates your inputs and you can't tell a wrong answer from a right one. Historical data doesn't fix that, but it moves the assumption somewhere you can argue about, and shocks arrive as correlated bundles that actually happened.

Dying with roughly $0 is a real mode in the app: floor and ceiling, or Yale style smoothing, where spending flexes instead of staying fixed.

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#32

Post by bryanlarsen »

nhootan wrote: post #28
bryanlarsen wrote: post #17

It's really nice to see a simulator that removes the home country bias. So many of these types of simulations use American data. But that's pretty extreme cherry-picking: America has had a pretty exceptional run these last 100+ years. Any retirement simulator cannot assume that America's exceptional growth will continue. Maybe it will, but you cannot plan on a maybe.

Thanks, that's most of why I built it. A US only backtest is one draw where you already know who won. This is 25 countries over 125 years, block bootstrapped with the domestic country resampled, so something like Japan after 1990 shows up.

Do you have Germany 1914 in your dataset? There's no safe withdrawal rate for that particular data point...

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#33

Post by nhootan »

pelagic_sky wrote: post #20
BretonForearm wrote: post #12

Why not let people try it from abroad? Not in the USA? No luck. Why does the withdrawal rate need to be a multiple of 0.5%? It's curious that the highest chance was associated with the highest (100%) stock ratio.

I'm in NZ and it worked. It gave me US figures and numbers though. And I find there are existing FIRE calculators already out there that are tried and true.

Glad it ran, but the numbers aren't US. Once you login, "Other, rest of world" gives you a gross projection with tax and benefits off. The returns come from the same 25 country bootstrap everyone gets, with the domestic country resampled rather than pinned to the US.

What's genuinely missing for you is NZ tax and NZ Super. So it worked, but you got the generic version.

On the existing calculators, they're good and I use them too. Most are tried and true against US history, which is the one sample where equities did unusually well. That's the gap I was after.

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#34

Post by nhootan »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #32
nhootan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that's most of why I built it. A US only backtest is one draw where you already know who won. This is 25 countries over 125 years, block bootstrapped with the domestic country resampled, so something like Japan after 1990 shows up.

Do you have Germany 1914 in your dataset? There's no safe withdrawal rate for that particular data point...

The Germany's data is in since 1901, but there is a gap between 1922-1923, cause the underlying dataset, DMS, has no bonds data for that period.

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#35

Post by nhootan »

drop_star wrote: post #3

Why do I need to sign into everything these days? The moment I see that I close the site.

The sign in is required for detailed plans to save the plans. Those plans also incure real comupte on the server. QC results are based on a cache in the browser and don't need sign in.

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#36

Post by nhootan »

memoryleakgame wrote: post #5

So its a monte carlo simulation but I can't enter growth rate country time horizons or anything like that? Brother I have a better claude code vibe app than this in an hour You need to really talk to a financial planner and learn what the proper inputs are

[dead]

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#37

Post by bluGill »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #18
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the thing is that no one knows that part.

Can't we just get AI to tell us? I'm sure it will confidently give an answer.

The latest AI is a lot better at not being over confident. There is still an issue but not as good as it used to be

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#38

Post by karmakurtisaani »

bluGill wrote: post #37
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't we just get AI to tell us? I'm sure it will confidently give an answer.

The latest AI is a lot better at not being over confident. There is still an issue but not as good as it used to be

But how can you trust anything it says if it doesn't have confidence? I tell even my children that the most important aspect of applying a job is a confident, firm handshake.

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#39

Post by rickydroll »

It will be far more interesting to show a model of how to have a successful retirement with more or less "normal" financial disasters, such as not making enough money to save in a high-COL area, losing your job in your 40s or later, followed by one to two years of unemployment, and then the replacement job pays a fraction of what you made before. There are other financial disasters, such as divorce or a major medical problem, that don't have to lead to bankruptcy, just a serious financial hit. Or even a model of what we have today, where people don't make enough money to save for retirement given the high COL.

Re: Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries

#40

Post by iamthemonster »

It's really sobering how much your use of international data impacts the failure rates. If you limit yourself to US historical data then I think about 3.5% withdrawal rate is bulletproof. But in your data I managed to get 2.2% failure rate when withdrawing just 2.5% p.a for 20 years!
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