I’m new to Tiller. Been using it for about six months. I am roughly a year away from retirement. What is the “best practice” recommendation to plan for this and set this up in Tiller? I currently have all my transactions pay, expenses, IRAs, etc. flowing into one transaction sheet, but I’m not sure that’s the way to look at things? I have also installed the “cash flow forecast sheet” and the “retirement planner” sheet as well. Thank you.
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I am retired, but I cannot speak to Tiller as a retirement planning tool. I use it to plan, budget and track income, expenses and net worth. For actual retirement ‘planning’, I have used Empower, New Retirement and Pralana retirement modeling tools. The latter two are very robust and offer the ability to model multiple scenarios. Both are a bit challenging to set up and enter your data but provide great insight into your future retirement years. I currently use and prefer Pralana online gold. Online/Gold - Pralana Retirement Calculator.
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What Tiller can do best to prepare you for retirement is to give you a full and complete understanding of your actual spending today so that you can better understand your desired retirement spending, and then keep on track with your retirement budget. For retirement planning, I would suggest finding a software tool that is specifically designed for retirement planning. Many such products are marketed only for financial planners to use with their clients, but there are consumer-facing products available as well.
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I retired two years ago. I agree with others on two key points:
- Tiller is not useful for retirement planning such as Monte Carlo simulation of returns over many years, including your spending, income, and investment style. I hired a couple different advisors to get comfortable personally, but DIY software is an option. “Best Practice” retirement planning is subjective, but it’s not Tiller.
- Tiller is extremely useful in understanding your current spending patterns and categories so you can have meaningful numbers to plug into a simulation tool. The Autocat capability is superb in its flexibility and the budget reports are straightforward. Understanding Spending is what Tiller does beautifully. I also appreciate that it is “just a spreadsheet” so I can manipulate at will.
Personally, I find Tiller to be “satisfactory” for tracking my investments such as IRAs, but I also use a firm to manage my investments aligned to my risk tolerance. Tiller’s investment capability is very basic, but I supplement it with my own spreadsheets within the Tiller file to track returns compared to indices (but it’s still pretty basic). There are sophisticated DIY investment tools available if you trade equities.
I find it mandatory to have my spending (savings/checking) accounts and credit cards on one Foundations/ Transactions file, and my investments on another. I am obtaining very different info from each, and it all becomes a blur if combined. The only transaction they have in common is my monthly transfer of funds from my investments to a spending account. You can have like five Foundations files that are all fed separate accounts from the Console.
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Thank you for answering my question. I guess I didn’t ask the right question. I think it was more like you were suggesting–how is it best to set up my Tiller account going into retirement. For example, keep a separate sheet for spending: I’ve added my IRA accounts to all my other transactions and I find it confusing now that everything is in one “big bucket.” And, keep a separate sheet for IRAs. And add a separate sheet for cashflow. Use the retirement planner just to know at a high level how much money you have. If you want to do planning (tax, monte carlo, etc., etc.), you need something more powerful and here are some options. My financial planner uses eMoney, but I find the categories don’t line up well or are not even close. I would like to look at my budget and even further categorize things into high level buckets like discretionary and non-discreationary. Thanks everyone for answer my questions.
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I just saw your last post and realized now that you’re asking a different question. I still use the Retirement and Cash Flow Forecast templates in retirement as the ability to model scenarios is quite good.
One thing I did before retirement was to group various asset/investment accounts into categories based on how I want to spend out of those accounts, track returns, and withdrawals/spending from each asset or investment category. I use a mix of the Net Worth, Tags Report, etc. and my own legacy sheets to do the analysis and tracking. I use a risk-based guardrails approach for decisions on significant discretionary spending that factors in the historical (returns) and the projected (cash flow). I keep a rolling projection that goes out until 2055. This is basically focused on ensuring I have clarity on:
- Investment returns across various categories with the ability for me to model what, if any, changes I expect with future returns
- Recent and projected expenses with a clear separation for normal monthly spending (non-discretionary, typical monthly discretionary like dining out, clothing, etc), and significant discretionary spending (daughter’s wedding, vacations, estate gifts to kids, new car, charity, etc).
The approach I take for significant discretionary spending, is to set up basically a budget that is then modeled in Tiller accounts as a liability. In the Cash Flow template, these are modeled as cash outflows. I did that before retirement as I like keeping my monthly and annual budget vs. actual analysis “clean” by keeping major discretionary expenditures separate.
I’m not sure any of that addresses your question, but it’s an approach that has worked well for us. I initially expected I’d stop using the Retirement and Cash Flow templates, but found that these both have been helpful tools during retirement for me.
My original reply before I saw your clarification about your question 
I have found the add-in Retirement Planner template for Tiller to be an excellent additional tool. This leverages the Cash Flow Forecast template and provides a great deal of flexibility in factoring in small or significant changes (expenses, income, returns, etc) these can be defined for a specific time frame or as one of changes.
I use other online tools for retirement analysis and also output from the CFP models to compare to the results I get using the Tiller combination of the Retirement and Cash Flow templates. I’m quite impressed with the accuracy of the modeling. Having this in Tiller gives me greater flexibility to do more detailed scenario analysis.
Hi Barry,
I am retired and started using Tiller to replace my home grown budgeting spreadsheet. I have kept my financial investments and retirement planning separated from budgeting in Tiller. I did this for three reasons. First, I don’t have the interest or time to track my investments in Tiller, although it can and is being done by folks. The financial tool used by my financial services company does a very good job doing these “planning” and “tracking” investment details like you mentioned. Second, the tool they have doesn’t allow for a detailed yearly budget (only a single month at a time). Third, I was spending way too much time managing the manual data aggregation function of my home grown budgeting spreadsheet.
Last year was my first with Tiller and I started out with high-level groups (discretionary and non-discretionary) and high-level categories (ex: Home Care) until I could gain a lower-level understanding of my expenses.
Starting now with 2025, I have just created a good first pass at lower-level “Categories” or sub-categories. I am using a “Category” setup that basically allows me to emulate groups, categories and sub-categories. The goal this year us to be better positioned to reallocate budget surplus to budget deficits and / or savings.
Clint
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I keep my retirement accounts going into a separate Tiller sheet so I don’t have so many transactions all clumped together. Then I link the balances for my IRA accounts into my main tiller sheet balances tab.
I use Empower for retirement planning.
I also created my own worksheet for keeping point in time snapshots of my various accounts. This helps me to see if I am on track.