ActuaPlan Beta Update v0.3 Healthcare and Long-term Care simulation, Social Security claiming age optimizer

August 30, 2025

Retirement Planning made easier on eyes.

TLDR
• 💊 Long-Term Care and Medical Simulation
• 🧮 Social Security Claiming-age Optimizer

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to again to share another major update to ActuaPlan. This update tackles a big gap I've wanted to close for a while: long-term care (LTC) and medical costs. They are often the costs that people have overlooked while planning for retirement. We have also introduced Social Security Claim Age Optimizer to help you compare results with different claiming ages in the context of your plan.

1. Long-Term Care and Medical simulation

In traditional retirement planning, long-term care and medical costs are often dealt with simplified assumptions. Some may use simple average, some put aside emergency funds to weather through these, some even overlook it!

We believe it is important to keep all these uncertainties in check. To do that we have built in LTC and medical models so that these costs are reflected in the chance of success.

1.1 Medical cost simulations

Medical costs are lumpy - most years they are modest, at some few bad years they can be quite heavy. To simulate this shape (right skew with fat tail) we draw the claims from lognormal model with parameters that user can specify (user inserts the typical and severe scenario, we backsolve the parameters for the lognormal model). The user can also set a medical inflation rate (on top of general inflation).

How to start

1. Open Toggle Advanced Modules → toggle LTC & Medical.
2. Toggle Medical Cost Projection on.
3. Set your typical and bad year's annual spend and medical inflation.
4. Run your simulation.
5. Review medical cost graph in the Assumption pill.

1.2 Long-Term Care simulations

Compared to medical costs, LTC can introduce large, longer-lasting costs. There are two models:

• Simple model: a single care state. User set the probability of getting into care and its annual cost.
• Advanced model (Pro): multiple care states and escalation:
  • Set the probability of entering into each state.
  • Set the costs for "typical" + "bad" year for the long-term care
  • Set probability of escalation: Home care → Residential → Nursing (as simplicity, de-escalation of the care state is not modeled).
  • The model backsolves the user input of probabilities into Gompertz curve and costs into parameters of the lognormal model.

Sensible defaults are hard here due to data scarcity (especially probabilities) and country-level difference. Please experiment and use inputs that make sense for your situation.

How to start

1. Open Toggle Advanced Modules → toggle LTC & Medical.
2. Toggle Long‑Term Care on.
3. Choose Simple or Advanced (Pro) and set probabilities and costs.
4. Run the simulation.
5. Review the health states in the Probabilities tab.

2. Social Security Claiming-age Optimizer

Should you claim at 62, or wait until 70? The optimizer runs your plan across each claiming age and compares Monte Carlo success rates, so you can see which age best supports your plan given your savings, spending, and market assumptions.

How to run it

1. In the bottom‑left, open the dropdown next to Run Simulation.
2. Select Optimizer → Social Security Claiming‑Age.
3. Click Run (it takes longer than a normal run).
4. Open the Optimization tab in the results to see the success rate by claiming age.

3. Other enhancements

Few more quality-of-life improvements:

• ActuaPlan now supports real-time toggle between nominal and real numbers.
• Assumptions tab at the results panel to display assumptions used in the projections.
• Optimization tab at the results panel to display the result of the optimizers.

The journey is fun and challenging

As usual, I'm happy to receive any feedback and suggestions to further improve the tool. Please don't hesitate to contact me directly via the feedback button located at the bottom right of the ActuaPlan app.