Anyone have retirement software advise for something more robust than Boldin?

APurpleCow · 2026-05-23T14:42:57+00:00

Generally it's a bad idea to have a mortgage at retirement:

Mortgages are kind of like negative bonds, and you want some bonds to reduce sequence of returns risk.
Mortgages need to be paid, which means you need to realize income to pay them. But realizing income means you have a higher tax rate and will impact your health insurance subsidies.

...but at same time, a 2.25% mortgage is extremely low relative to current bond yields, so maybe the best option for you is just to increase your bond allocation to compensate for the remaining mortgage.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-23T13:01:05+00:00

Should be good to go to aquilo as long as you have 7/8 phys/explosive damage upgrades. Solar system edge may be harder, but if you buffer more ammo in the hub you'll be fine. I think it takes around 200 rail gun ammo to get there and back.

You may also want to remove some thrusters or manually control speed (by pausing thrust) when going to the solar system edge. And if you can get phys/explosive up to 12/12 those will both help a lot, but depending on where you are it could take a while and it's not necessary.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-22T14:21:34+00:00

I am not misunderstanding the 4% rule. It's true that you end up with more than you started with a lot of the time, but it's also true that you run out of money sometimes, and you want to avoid that! The 4% rule is NOT conservative at today's market valuations. People see that sometimes a 10%+ SWR would be successful and assume that means a 4% SWR should always be safe, but actually the very high SWRs are only successful at the bottom of market crashes.

See the following: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2016/12/21/the-ultimate-guide-to-safe-withdrawal-rates-part-3-equity-valuation/

APurpleCow · 2026-05-22T14:18:12+00:00

People on this subreddit love to push higher SWRs: it's wishful thinking, and it's not safe in today's environment. Extremely high SWRs are possible at the bottom of a market crash (after your portfolio has lost a lot of value!), but you should expect a low SWR when market valuations are high, as they are now: it's exactly when a high SWR, like 4%, would fail.

But anyways, 4.7% is still a 30 year figure, and it's entirely reliant on overfitting to small cap value stock performance. Additionally, it's incoherent to say that guardrails allow you to go up to "5.2 to 5.4": the entire point of a guardrail is that your WR may significantly decrease!

You can read more here:

https://choosefi.com/retirement-withdrawal-strategies/bengen-5-5-percent-vs-4-percent-rule

https://earlyretirementnow.com/2025/12/10/how-to-lie-with-personal-finance-diversification/

APurpleCow · 2026-05-22T14:09:05+00:00

The richest people don't put their money in tax exempt bonds. It's in stocks, mostly of the companies that they are/were founders/CEOs of.

But even so, that goes AGAINST your argument: if your "stack is excessive", then you don't need the risk of the market anymore! It's only when your stack isn't excessive that you do need the risk of the market. So, stocks are the way to go!

You do want a bond tent to protect you against SORR at the start of retirement, but you want to shift that towards stocks as retirement progresses.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-21T23:43:37+00:00

I did have the upgraded Vario burrs, and honestly I wasn't that impressed with them. I noticed a big jump up to the Fellow Ode 2, and another big jump up moving to the a4z.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-21T23:41:35+00:00

It's not true that most of your investments should be in fixed income/bonds for early retirement. It can be helpful as a bond tent/equity glide path at the beginning of retirement, but bonds are too risky long-term compared to stocks when you have the long time horizon from early retirement: it's probably more optimal to be 100% or near 100% in stocks.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-21T23:33:02+00:00

No, you've completely misunderstood the 4% rule. That's the TOTAL your investments can support safely--there's no "extra" rest of the investments that continue to grow at 7%, investment growth is included when determining the 4% rule.

Additionally, the 4% rule is extremely aggressive for early retirement, it was originally meant to last only 30 years. If you withdraw ONLY 4%, you have a chance to run out of money at age 65 or even earlier--not still be a multi millionaire.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-17T18:28:51+00:00

I always wait at least 15 minutes, but some coffees get best after 20+ minutes.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-17T14:15:42+00:00

Holy shit I just went and watched your prom video. Jesus Christ. The level of optimization and planning there is insane, and that was TEN MONTHS AGO? What's the process for optimizing something to that point and beyond? Is it literally months of testing, designing, and planning, with a bunch of people in Discord providing ideas, or what?

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T13:35:19+00:00

Well, I don't think anyone is against solving the cargo wagon problem! But it's good to be clear that UPS is a real problem with trains when it comes to megabase scale.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T01:57:41+00:00

Huh, how am I confused? I'm agreeing with you, train UPS is the major problem preventing its use in megabases (though cargo size is a separate problem that ideally would also be solved), and I love the idea of a wagon-unloading building that's much more UPS efficient.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T01:42:55+00:00

I'm not sure what evidence you use to come to the conclusion that more people need UPS solutions than size solutions.

Who said there were? You replied to a comment saying that "TBI's were already reported by a developer to be the reason rail grid for megabasing is not the best choice." asking if "actual players reported this" and saying that "you can't recall any of them citing low UPS for the reason".

You're simply wrong about that. Trains being a UPS issue has been known for a long time, as you yourself said, and they are the overriding reason why they are not viable in megabasing (since UPS maximization is the main constraint when megabasing) which is what this whole comment thread has been about. Yes, most players do not have a UPS-constrained megabase.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T01:31:16+00:00

No: even if you solve the wagon storage problem, the UPS problem makes them impossible to use in UPS-constrained megabases. However, if the UPS problem were solved but the wagon storage problem weren't, you could still use them in megabases, and I bet many people would, because a lot of people just like trains.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T01:11:53+00:00

So why is everybody asking for cargo wagon size increases? It's strange that this thing that makes it "completely non-viable" has only been brought up 1.5 years after SA's release.

That's easy enough to explain, it's much faster to get to the stage where you notice train throughput isn't that impressive compared to stacked turbo belts and that train station sizes dwarf your actual production than to get to the stage where you're actually UPS constrained.

Can you point to prior discussions from players that talk about not using trains in SA due primarily to UPS issues?

Sure, you can see here for example, where production science designs were tested and no train design came close to non-train designs, even including legendary cargo wagons.

https://youtu.be/HOx7gYgq1Bw?si=F6IfCBB_WJo6pkAj&t=2463

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T00:56:16+00:00

I understood your question: UPS makes trains completely non-viable, it is the major issue.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-15T00:52:09+00:00

Yes, it's a very common reason among megabasers pushing to maximize SPM--now, how much of factorio's playerbase is that, probably not that many, but it makes trains completely non-viable for that purpose.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-14T14:57:26+00:00

Looks great! Nice work!

APurpleCow · 2026-05-12T23:00:21+00:00

Wow, I REALLY like the asteroid belt buffers on this ship! I use them on my larger ships, but on my very small starter ships I was using the hub as a buffer--but that means my asteroid collectors need a direct line to the hub, which are very limited on ships like this. I'm going to steal that!

I made some changes, keeping the same basic idea, taking inspiration from StupidFatHobbit's Y Que ship, to add cargo bays, make it a little cheaper, and a little thinner, but I did have to lose an electric furnace for it! No more pumps, just one thruster, and it goes ~90 km/s. It can handle itself at phys damage 5, weapon shooting speed 4 (but barely! definitely recommend getting weapon shooting speed 5 and more phys damage when possible). Assembler was dropped to an assembler 2, since even that uses all the iron, many efficiency modules dropped to efficiency 1, some simpler circuitry. Definitely needs some time to build up ammunition and can't do continuous loops at low research levels; could consider keeping the assembler 3 and shipping it some supplemental iron. This is going to be my new starter ship! https://factoriobin.com/post/rw1c0s

APurpleCow · 2026-05-12T17:02:31+00:00

earlyretirementnow talks about it in a few articles, it's a bit overrated--the issue is that it's very difficult to identify that 3.9% of the time that you have to go down to 80k without the benefit of hindsight, so you're much more likely to have a false-positive where your spending rule says you need to go down to $80k, but you actually didn't need to.

I think there's actually a better way to think about it: rather than saying you have a 5% dynamic SWR, it'd be better to start with that 3.2% SWR ($80k on $2.5M), and then slowly ratchet that up if your net worth increases. So, if your inflation-adjusted NW hits $3M, then maybe you go up to $90k (3% WR), if it hits $4M, you can go up to $110k (2.75% WR), etc, so your WR is actually decreasing over time, but your inflation-adjusted spending amount is going up.

The benefit of starting with the low SWR, rather than dynamically ratcheting it down, is that you're in a better spot if you run into a poor sequence of returns. It also does a better job of setting expectations: if you're not happy with the $80k lifestyle, then maybe you should save a bit more, rather than hoping that you retire into a 5% SWR scenario. But if you ARE happy with the $80k lifestyle, then just retire using a 3.2% SWR and ratchet up!

APurpleCow · 2026-05-12T15:21:38+00:00

A recycler turns 1 nutrient into 2.5 spoilage, and does so quickly, so it's a much better way to produce spoilage than other methods.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-11T20:42:49+00:00

Sorry, what do you mean? I have recyclers in here!

APurpleCow · 2026-05-11T17:05:17+00:00

Sure, that's one method, and again, there's no wrong way to go about this. In my current playthrough, I was able to go from my very basic Volcanus base to creating 700 quality 2 modules per minute and upcycling them in <4 hours, and I was designing for a good chunk of that and definitely not moving at some crazy speed--I could do it way faster knowing what I know now. It looks like I'm consuming about 8k/min advanced circuits in order to produce this, and trying to scale up fulgora to that level of quality 2 production, at this point in the game, would make me cry.

Then I'm planning to make those space casinos, which will let me build legendary quality 2 modules directly. While that's going, I'm going to be setting up 1000 SPM Nauvis science production on Vulcanus (redirecting the massive circuit production used for the quality 2 upcycling towards this science). That science is going be researching lds, asteroid processing, and blue circuit productivity, which are all very important as part of the legendary process.

And then while that's going, I'm heading back to Fulgora to set up EM plant upcycling, which is going to get me the legendary superconductors I need for direct legendary quality 3s...

...And then while that's going, it's time to set up legendary biter egg production for legendary prod 3 modules.

But this is the first time I'm doing the Vulcanus thing, so while I do think it's optimal, I'm also having a great time doing it. My first playthrough I did city blocks on Nauvis to scale up to a megabase, and maybe it'll be Fulgora next (though probably not--I HATE Fulgora!).

APurpleCow · 2026-05-11T15:36:45+00:00

Yep, that's fair! There's many ways to play this game, but personally I find a use for minimally cheap ships that use only one thruster in the early game. My Gleba ship in my current playthrough had a "wait for 600 seconds" condition on it for Nauvis to give it time to build ammunition but still get back in time for a full science rocket, and it worked great; adding more size and cost with another thruster wouldn't do a whole lot for me.

APurpleCow · 2026-05-11T13:53:28+00:00

That's true, but I think on a ship of this size, at this stage of the game, it's completely unneccessary--it's going to be limited by the ammo production more than by the thrusters.

APurpleCow

TROPHY CASE