Personal Finance (Not Investing) • Pralana Online Released - Impressions

I am also interested in Pralana Online and have been reading the User Manual (haven’t purchased it yet). I have also been reading the Bug and Wishnlist sections on the forum. Unfortunately, I can’t post questions yet since I haven’t purchased—hope to get some insights here.

1. Does Pralana Online calculate the Funded Ratio in any of the 3 modeling modes? To me, this is a key metric and I want to be able to replicate it.

2. When modeling QCDs, I find that using a percentage of RMDs is the most convenient and practical approach. It also provides a knob that can easily be adjusted to help target a specific tax bracket. I don’t see anything like this mentioned in the documentation and wondered if I missed something.

3. Security — it seems like the data is readable on the back end and is associated with our Name, email and credit card. Anyone else concerned about this? If so, what steps did you take to preserve security?

Thanks in advance!

WoodSpinner

1. It does not do a funded ratio. You can export results to a spreadsheet and do whatever math on it suits you, though currently the data is broken up into several tables though I think they are working on a more united spreadsheet results file.

As I understand the funded ratio, it's purpose is a retirement readiness check. Pralana is less theoretical than that and more about how your portfolio will do given your assumptions. For checking retirement readiness, it has eight withdrawal methods, from specifying expenses to amortization to consumption smoothing and each also has Historical and Monte Carlo options. In the historical analysis, you can choose to see the all your results using any given starting year, so you can see just how bad off you would be if you had retired in 1965 for instance. It also has a solver for "Earliest safe retirement date" which uses your projected income and makes Monte Carlo runs starting at your current age until it finds a year that achieves a 90% probability of success.

2. For QCDs, you enter dollar amounts and years.

3. There was a surprising (to me) amount of security discussion upthread. What I got out of reading that was that they use a third party for payments (Stripe), so even if someone hacked the Pralana servers, they wouldn't get your CC. The program does not link to accounts, so the most it would reveal to a hacker is that you have money, which a determined hacker can figure out lots of other ways too. You can export your data to your computer after each session and delete it from the server if you like. I think I read upthread that they keep a user data backup for a week.

Statistics: Posted by WoodSpinner — Sat Dec 21, 2024 12:17 pm — Replies 257 — Views 24569