That report is showing "contributions" not running balance for the ROTH. So if you are not contributing, you should see 0's there. The balance of that ROTH is part of the total balance you see for either partner in a married report.

You can indicate the order of withdrawals--ROTH vs the other qualified assets--in an area at the bottom of the screen Smooth Withdrawals in the Retirement Assets area. You can reorder or those accounts. And, yes, typically it does help to move the ROTH to last in that order (the default order). However, the reports do not actually show the separate pools of money. They are all under Retirement Assets. There's only so many columns I guess.

It is really hard to discuss in the abstract since so many factors can influence the discretionary spending. Look at your Regular Assets report. I suspect you are seeing that balance zero out at one or more spots before SS at 70 kicks in? This is the liquidity constraint that is keeping your discretionary spending from being smooth. Have you looked at using Special Withdrawals from either your regular or ROTH accounts? You can override the smooth withdrawals with numbers in special withdrawals.

To use special withdrawals, first look and see what the smooth withdraw amount is, and then enter a series of amounts that are higher than that amount--making a guess. You can also try making the age of last withdraw closer to the present. This will also, of course, raise the amount of each withdrawal.

OK, I think your question is: why is my discretionary spending not smooth? This could be because of borrowing constraint as I said before. Or it could be that you have changed the standard of living curve with the standard of living setting in Assumptions (set it to go from 100% to say 85% at some specific year for example).

Or perhaps if I read this right, you are simply seeing the discretionary spending change to match "per adult living standard" after you die. That is what it's supposed to do. The discretionary spending is "household" spending--it accounts for both adults (and children if applicable) in the household. So when one person dies, less money is needed in the household in order for the surviving adult to have the same living standard. So the survivor's living standard doesn't go down--it's just that he or she needs less to live on with only one person to sustain.

Again, just to be clear: the discretionary spending after you die is not supposed to be the same as it was before you die. This is because it doesn't take as much discretionary spending for one person as it does for two. typically you see the new discretionary spending equal what you saw in "per adult living standard" in the far right column. I would not try to override that. This is by design.

I'm a new user and a bit late to join this conversation.
My husband and I are recently retired and are new to the ESPlanner software.
We're at the stage of doing trade-offs to increase our smooth discretionary spending. As a secondary goal, we would like to leave some assets to our adult children. To understand what we might be leaving them, we need to know the composition of our final retirement assets (Roth compared to deductible IRA/401k). As of fall 2017, is there a way to get this info from the reports short of creating a spreadsheet to compute the separate balances for each profile that we run? A Roth is much better than an equal dollar traditional IRA. Thanks to anyone who can help!!

Welcome:

I'd just enter a special expenditure or series or set of special expenditures in the amount you want to give the children in the years you want to give it. IF those amounts create a $0 balance in regular assets, you might need to take some special withdrawals from retirement assets. Remember too that the value of the house is left on the table at death.

Dan, Thanks for the special expenditure idea.
I'm still interested in knowing the composition of our retirement accounts- Roth and deductible IRA over time.That should help to understand the true value of our net worth.
Is there a way to get the individual Roth and transitional IRA balances from the software?
Thanks again for your help.

Not at this point there's not. There's been some thought about separating them out in the reports in the MaxiFi program.

No, sorry if I wasn't clear. The only future changes possible would be in MaxiFi reports, not ESPlanner.

https://www.esplanner.com/esplanner-going-forward

No, the Roth withdraws are not shown separately yet in MaxiFi, but I do believe that's in the plan for 2019 feature in MaxiFi.