Jim Otar’s Otar Retirement Calculator can be used to really plan your retirement. He does not subscribe to the 3-6-9 philosophy of most financial planners. What’s that you say, what is the 3-6-9 philosophy?

When you go to see most financial planners they will use what is almost an industry-wide de facto standard of of long-term averages. They are 3% inflation, 6% fixed income returns and 9% equity returns.

Using these figures your retirement will be rose and you can dance down the yellow brick road with Dorothy and the Tin Man if you like.

But Jim Otar whose background is engineering totally disagrees with this philosophy and has created his own calculator. I think it was Jim who said why do we design an oil rig to withstand a Hurricane and don’t build a retirement plan to withstand a Bear Market crash? So he went out to try to do just that.

What is so special about this calculator is it doesn’t use those voodoo mathematics like long term averages? Read the rest of this entry »