WinMonte - Windows-based Monte Carlo Retirement Simulator
While retirement was still be far away, this was a fun planning tool to play
with different retirement scenarios. A professional retirement planner ran a
few simulations for me, but I wanted to run a bunch of my own. I thought such
a program would be generally available, but I couldn't find one easily. This
program started off as command line based program, but I also wanted an excuse
to write my first Windows GUI program, this is it.
In particular, I wanted to do different kinds of spending scenarios than any of
the standard Monte Carlo simulators had. For example, I wanted to simulate
spending less during years when investment returns were bad. Of interest, I
also simulated the generally accepted theory of keeping a couple years of
spending money in cash. It NEVER does better than the regular simulation and
there is good reasons why.
To just tinker with the program, download it and the help file into any
convenient directory and run it.
Of course you always run a virus scan on any executable you download,
right? :) You will get warnings about it being an unsigned program. It will
take your inputs (which it can save) and show you results for several diferent
spending scenarios. If you want a starter input file, download the starter.ini
file. You can edit this file with a regular text editor too if you want, changes
will be reflected when you fire up the executable.
If you woud like to tinker with the program itself, download the source code,
unzip it, and the necessary tools to compile it are in the Readme.txt file.
It is all standard C using Windows APIs directly. I'm not smart enough for C++
and the third party GUI libraries seemed more trouble than they were worth.
Have fun tinkering with it and if you have comments/quetions, let me know. I
know the GUI polish isn't there, but it shoud work nicely. Naturally, don't
make any important decisions based on just this program (I didn't), that is what
your professional retirement planner is for.
Program Only (use save-as)
Help File (use save-as)
Starter config file (use save-as)
Source Code (use save-as)
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