He does indeed! He's responded to bug reports I sent in, and the new toggle "Social Security will continue full benefits?" is in response to a request that I made to put that in. Well, I was ONE of the people who requested that.whaleknives wrote: ↑Thu May 11, 2017 12:37 pmYes, James S. Welch, Jr. responds to emails!LeeMKE wrote:. . . Another thing I like about I-ORP is that help is available. My first attempt gave me odd results, and I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. By following the instructions, you can get the inventor? (what exactly do you call a model owner?) to look at your work and give you feedback. Once I got that help, the results have been great for me. . . I make a donation every year because this model is valuable to me. (I also didn't hesitate to buy a copy of Living Off Your Money when some Bogleheads fixated on the insult of paying for the book.)
Two points about i-orp, one general and one specific: I have used i-orp extensively to make small "delta" comparisons, i.e., most of our retirement plan is fixed at this point, but i-orp is nice to use to make comparisons of small changes in the planning. Any tool of this point is more accurate for such small variations and i-orp works well for this.
Second, the OP makes the point about modeling the tradeoff in taking/delaying SS vs. drawing down your own money while you wait to start SS. i-orp models total spending in retirement and convinced me that while delaying SS clearly gives you more money from SS, the effect on the total is actually very small, and certainly within the uncertainty limits of the modeling and unknowable future events.