The purpose of Retirement Plan Simulator (RPS) is to pressure test the survivability of financial plans for retirement by running the following simulations:
Baseline Simulation: RPS will simulate your retirement plan against a simple smooth annual return rates of 6% for stocks and 3% for bonds, and 2.25% inflation rate.
Historical Simulation: RPS will simulate your retirement plan against actual prior historical market performance and sequence of events. Annual return rates of the S&P500 index (or total stock market index when available), intermediate bond fund index and inflation rates are used in the simulation.
RPS cannot definitively tell if a plan will survive retirement, but it can show the possible range of results that could be experienced during retirement. If a plan can survive every sequence of events in history (even the worst-case sequence of events), there is an excellent chance the plan will survive future scenarios.