Social Security Optimization

Issues and Potential Errors

Last Post by Bill Hines, Advice-Only Flat-F... 6 years ago

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Bill Hines, Advice-Only Flat-F...

(@hines202)

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Joined: 6 years ago

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Topic starter March 4, 2021 8:03 am

A client and I were working some Social Security scenarios. We had PRC Gold set up so that the three scenarios were based on different SS claiming dates for each of them. We made sure those were the only deltas between the scenarios.

But when we did the SS Optimization button on Scenarios 1, 2, 3 it was showing very different optimization tables. I know it's a weird thing to do, and I'm not sure why we even did that. But it seemed like it would always return the same recommendations and not factor in the current SS settings and start from scratch and factor in all of the other data to give the best answer?

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Social Security

Stuart Matthews

(@smatthews51)

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Joined: 6 years ago

Posts: 618

March 4, 2021 5:49 pm

Bill,

If the scenarios are truly identical with the exception of the SS claiming ages then SS optimization algorithm should return identical results. I just tested this myself and did get the same results on all three scenarios. I will confess, though, that it takes a little diligence to get all scenarios identical (and creating a global scenario copy is on my enhancement list to make this easier). This should be confirmed by going to the Tabular Projections > Summary page and verifying that you're seeing identical results on Net Worth in the final year (but you'll first have to set SS claiming ages the same). Once you've done that, then you can do the SS optimization with the expectation of identical results for each scenario. At the risk of stating the obvious, though, be sure that you do in fact run the optimization for each scenario: you cannot run it just once and then switch between scenarios to compare results. Any given optimization activity relates only to the selected scenario.

If you've done all of this and are still seeing a difference between scenarios, then I'd appreciate seeing an export file so I can investigate.

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Bill Hines, Advice-Only Flat-F...

(@hines202)

Reputable Member Customer

Joined: 6 years ago

Posts: 321

Topic starter March 5, 2021 9:30 am

This no longer occurs after we downloaded the latest update, which fixed a calculation error that occurred when the retirement period began prior to the start of the modeling period, which was our scenario. Great job keeping up with the frequent updates!

Martin H reacted

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