Retirement Calculators In the Crossfire: Garbage In – Garbage Out?

Senior housing Costs What constitutes a good retirement or senior living cost calculator?  Lately, there has been some cross-fire on the value and the accuracy of retirement calculators out on the web.  A recent story by CBS news entitled, “6 Things Retirement Calculators Get Wrong” that covered Mark Miller was critical of retirement planning calculators and their assumptions regarding savings rates, investment returns, inflation projections, life expectancy and other components.  Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a developer of one of the calculators referenced in the prior article, responded some of the criticism but agree that there are imperfections in many of the calculators that exist on the web today.

Senior Housing News developed a simple calculator to examine the basic income and expenses associated with senior living.  Our senior living costs calculator is a simple calculator, leaving the guess work up to the user.  It’s simple and straight-forward.  At the end of the day, we provide a tool to estimate and compare expenses between living at home versus some kind of assisted living or skilled nursing care.  The calculators are not meant to be 100% accurate because the inputs follow the typical “Garbage In, Garbage” out theory.

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Whether you like the fancy calculators with the bells and the whistles or the simple income and costs analysis, using some kind of planning tool, albeit imperfect is better than ignoring fiscal responsibility for planning retirement.

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