I'd have to see those numbers to really understand (maybe) what's going on. But the conventional planning seems to me to prove the folly of selecting your own discretionary spending target more than anything really useful. In my view, why select your own target when the program will simply calculate that for you. I suppose if you want to show some FP why his/her target is wrong? But even in "conventional" planning there is smoothing going on--which is NOT a feature of conventional planning. So it's weird hybrid in my view.