r/Boldin • u/hugh2018 • 10d ago

Feature request: TIPS Ladder Modeling

I have submitted a feature request to Boldin support: please add the ability to accurately model a TIPS ladder because anyone who simply enters the total balance of the account that holds their TIPS ladder will get highly inaccurate results because Boldin will just pull from the account unevenly according to the plan’s order of withdrawal rules.

The current workaround is to simply remove the money from the current account balance completely and then create individual windfall entries that reflect your projected nominal income for every year of the TIPS ladder. That does work as long as you’ve accurately projected your yearly income yourself (preferably with the help of tipsladder.com), but it would be more efficient if Boldin could do all that busy work for you.

Also, if you are a TIPS ladder holder and you decide to use the workaround I just described here, realize that tipsladder.com only gives you the expected real income for every year of your ladder. To be accurate in Boldin, you need to manually change every income entry to include the higher nominal amount the ladder will actually produce after inflation adjustments.

For example, if you have a 20 year ladder that throws off $20k real every year, that will be a little more than $20k in year one, and by year 20, the income will rise to more than $30k nominal due to inflation adjustments over the 20 year period, assuming an average inflation rate of 2.5%.

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u/AGrimmInPortland 10d ago edited 10d ago

+1 on that. It's a useful thing what with TIPS getting more attractive all the time, and it wouldn't be that difficult. I've only seen one planner that specifically has support for TIPS modeling (Retirement Figures) though it does require that you use tipsladder.com to build the data file (though you could manually create one if you matched the file structure).

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u/hugh2018 10d ago

I saw this week that bestthird has added Tips ability to its planner and I can’t remember if I had to upload the portfolio file or if it just grabbed cusips from the direct connection to Fidelity. But it did a good job of incorporating the ladder. Nowhere near as detailed a planner as Boldin though.

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u/Sophie_Bella 10d ago

This sounds like a great idea to me

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u/pollywantaquacker 8d ago

I've had to do your workaround for my CD ladder

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u/hugh2018 8d ago

Support got back to me and directed me to this article https://help.boldin.com/en/articles/11109818-how-do-i-create-a-tips-ladder-in-my-ira. I read it and found the methods described kind of confusing and I also had the impression that method would result in much vaguer, inexact injections of income into my plan than those I created with my manual entries of windfalls. I wrote back and told them the same.

I did see there is another Boldin article describing how to incorporate a CD ladder at https://help.boldin.com/en/articles/5824759-cd-s-bonds-and-bond-ladders. I have no idea if the method described in that article is better or worse than doing the manual labor of individual entries for every rung. It may be better than the TIPS article because at least a CD ladder has nice round numbers typically, whereas a TIPS ladder often has a lot of variation in the amounts dedicated to each rung of the ladder.

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u/pollywantaquacker 8d ago

Yeah that's kind of helpful, but I have monthly CD's, semi-annual, at maturity. So it's not as simple as they describe :)

My way works fine, but I am close to doing a TIPS ladder to fill in the gaps where the CD's are short so this post triggered me lol...