A Tax-Efficient Model Predictive Control Policy for Retirement Funding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Johansson, Kasper, Boyd, Stephen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Johansson, Kasper
Boyd, Stephen
author_facet Johansson, Kasper
Boyd, Stephen
contents The retirement funding problem addresses the question of how to manage a retiree's savings to provide her with a constant post-tax inflation adjusted consumption throughout her lifetime. This consists of choosing withdrawals and transfers from and between several accounts with different tax treatments, taking into account basic rules such as required minimum distributions and limits on Roth conversions, additional income, liabilities, taxes, and the bequest when the retiree dies. We develop a retirement funding policy in two steps. In the first step, we consider a simplified planning problem in which various future quantities, such as the retiree's remaining lifetime, future investment returns, and future inflation, are known. Using a simplified model of taxes, we pose this planning problem as a convex optimization problem, where we maximize the bequest subject to providing a constant inflation adjusted consumption target. Since this problem is convex, it can be solved quickly and reliably. We leverage this planning method to form a retirement funding policy that determines the actions to take each year, based on information known at that time. Each year the retiree forms a new plan for the future years, using the current account values and life expectancy, and optionally, updated information such as changes in tax rates or rules. The retiree then carries out the actions from the first year of the current plan. This update-plan-act cycle is repeated each year, a general policy called model predictive control (MPC). The MPC retirement policy reacts to the effects of uncertain investment returns and inflation, changes in the retiree's expected lifetime or external income and liabilities, and changes in tax rules and rates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the MPC retirement policy using Monte Carlo simulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Tax-Efficient Model Predictive Control Policy for Retirement Funding
Johansson, Kasper
Boyd, Stephen
Optimization and Control
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
The retirement funding problem addresses the question of how to manage a retiree's savings to provide her with a constant post-tax inflation adjusted consumption throughout her lifetime. This consists of choosing withdrawals and transfers from and between several accounts with different tax treatments, taking into account basic rules such as required minimum distributions and limits on Roth conversions, additional income, liabilities, taxes, and the bequest when the retiree dies. We develop a retirement funding policy in two steps. In the first step, we consider a simplified planning problem in which various future quantities, such as the retiree's remaining lifetime, future investment returns, and future inflation, are known. Using a simplified model of taxes, we pose this planning problem as a convex optimization problem, where we maximize the bequest subject to providing a constant inflation adjusted consumption target. Since this problem is convex, it can be solved quickly and reliably. We leverage this planning method to form a retirement funding policy that determines the actions to take each year, based on information known at that time. Each year the retiree forms a new plan for the future years, using the current account values and life expectancy, and optionally, updated information such as changes in tax rates or rules. The retiree then carries out the actions from the first year of the current plan. This update-plan-act cycle is repeated each year, a general policy called model predictive control (MPC). The MPC retirement policy reacts to the effects of uncertain investment returns and inflation, changes in the retiree's expected lifetime or external income and liabilities, and changes in tax rules and rates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the MPC retirement policy using Monte Carlo simulation.
title A Tax-Efficient Model Predictive Control Policy for Retirement Funding
topic Optimization and Control
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10603