I took a pair of reports for a particular scenario, one just prior to the update, and one just after, and pored over them until I was blue in the face. In each year, my discretionary spending increases about 2.8% after the update. The assumptions were identical. My total taxes ROSE 0.23% in the later report, as one would anticipate from your engineer’s observation that tax brackets did not rise as much as projected, i.e. after the update more of my income would be taxed in high brackets. But first, this is a very small difference; and more importantly it is in the wrong direction, increased taxes should decrease my discretionary spending.

The only other observation I made is that the estate details show that my regular assets this year are 0.1% lower after the update, in spite of identical assumptions. At (arbitrarily) age 90, they are 0.6% lower. There is NO change in any year in retirement assets or home equity. Increased spending would of course lower my assets; but why just the regular assets, and not the retirement accounts? And both scenarios seem to leave me exactly broke at age 100.

I’m just not knowledgeable and/or smart enough to figure out what’s going on. I’m probably missing something obvious, since your engineer noted only a tiny difference in his reports after the update. If I send you the two example reports, could you go through them and see if you can figure it out?

Okay, I think I may have found the source of the problem, though I don’t understand it. For clarification, I should add that my upgrade was from 2.34.0 to 2.35.0; I did not upgrade to 2.34.1, because it was my understanding that this didn’t affect me.

On “the social security benefits” detail page, the older report shows both mine and my wife’s benefits dropping by about 3% a year, the new one shows NO decline, hence the increase in discretionary spending. (Actually, they both show a 20% drop in 2034, which I programmed on the assumptions page, but that’s irrelevant.) It’s almost as if I had switched off the increase for inflation, then switched it back on after the upgrade, though I don’t even see where you can do that, and I certainly didn’t intentionally do it.

Since 2.34.1 fixed only some social security issues, is my not doing that upgrade the source of the problem? I’ve read the release notes for 2.34.1, and really don’t understand them. But the problem seems to be that 2.34.0 was not adjusting social security benefits for inflation, which would have been a major error, and I don’t get the sense that 2.34.1 fixed anything that significant. Or did it?