u/No-Biscotti-2989

When calculating the Survivor Benefit in your software, please clarify if you use the full Option A/Option B calculations as listed in Doug Runchey's definitive article "Understanding the CPP's Survivor Benefit" dated February 8, 2023 (website https://retirehappy.ca/cpp-survivor-benefits/ ).

The Option B calculation normally reduces what you might expect under the 60% rule down to 36% - I know because that happened to me when my wife died some years ago but Doug kindly confirmed my calculations so I knew what to expect ahead of time and could plan accordingly. Of course the other main limitation is that you will never receive more than the maximum CPP benefit, especially limiting if you are almost at the maximum based on your own contributions.

I have checked this forum and found a similar complaint from 6 months ago at https://www.reddit.com/r/adviice/comments/1oz93b7/is_it_possible_to_adjust_discoverylevel_info_by/

In my case I am exploring my daughter selling her house now and living with me until my demise. My house must then be sold and I need to know is it better for her to rent or buy with her assets at that time (she will be 68+ then I hope - me 90+!).

I first modelled her Renting by overriding previous scenarios (CPP@65 or 70 with maxGIS/ISP) for rent plus other costs then setting up Sell House option. This enabled me to easily go back and delete the Sell House option and overrides should she stay in her house for now (as previously modelled and Locked).

BUT the buying scenario required more Discovery snapshots and would be difficult to construct correctly due to requiring a lot of overrides. So I Locked all the Rental scenarios and constructed a Buying Scenario almost from scratch. This worked well, but now I have no easy way to unlock the Rental or any previous scenarios without Locking the Buying Scenario and then destroying the related snapshots.

The previous post linked above noted this problem and suggested that when locking a scenario the matching Discovery section (and Foundation?) be saved and returned when unlocked (overriding any existing Discovery section). Otherwise there is a fair amount of work required to redo the whole Discovery section to return to the earlier scenarios correctly (assuming you wrote down all the entries before changing).

Has any further consideration been given to this idea in the ensuing 6 months? I find this has been my most frustrating limitation with the existing platform, which is otherwise a wonderful resource. I will be renewing my annual subscription when due in July.

Survivor Benefit Calculation used by your Software

Difficult to model new scenarios without Discovery changes