Working with sequence input

Sometimes input amounts need to change from one year to the next. Here’s how to enter sequences of values in fields that vary by duration.

When values change every year, separate them with semicolons. If the face amount starts at $100,000 and goes up $10,000 every year for five years, type

        100000; 110000; 120000; 130000; 140000; 150000

The last value repeats until the end, as you’d expect. It doesn’t “run out of numbers” and drop to zero. In this case, the face amount stays at $150,000 until maturity.

You can type spaces if you like, or leave them out. But don’t write a dollar sign, and don’t separate thousands with commas. Not every country uses dollars, and some write a comma after every fourth digit.

Values can vary even if they aren’t numbers. For instance, a payment mode of

        annual; monthly

means annual in the first year, and monthly thereafter. For values like payment mode that aren’t numbers, the pasting instructions list the words you can use.

Suppose you want to pay a $10,000 premium every year for the first twenty policy years, and then stop. You don’t have to type the number twenty times. Just say

        10000 20; 0

Remember to put a zero at the end, because the last value repeats.

To pay $10,000 a year for the first ten policy years, then $5,000 a year until the end of the fifteenth year, type

        10000 10; 5000 15; 0

You may want to enter payments that depend on attained age. Type

        10000 @70; 0

to pay $10,000 every year until age 70. You can even make that the default payment pattern for a whole group. It means a different number of years for different issue ages. Or you can make the pattern use retirement age: type

        10000 retirement; 0

to pay $10,000 until retirement. To take a $5,000 withdrawal each year after retirement, type

        0 retirement; 5000

You can also say

        0 retirement; 5000 maturity

if you want to spell it all out.

Sometimes you want a value to apply for a certain number of years. Type

        0 retirement; 5000 #10; 0

to get a withdrawal of $5,000 for ten years, no matter when retirement starts.

As that example shows, you can mix different ways of saying what periods of time you mean. Read it piece by piece:

        0 retirement

means “zero until retirement”, and then

        5000 #10

means “$5,000 a year for the next ten years”.

Whatever way you enter a sequence, error messages show it in a standard mathematical notation:

You can use that notation yourself if you want. For example, you can write the last example above as

        0,[0,retirement);10000,[retirement,#10);0

Remember:


Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Gregory W. Chicares. This program, including its documentation, is free software. Read the terms under which you can redistribute and modify it.

Maintained by Gregory W. Chicares. The latest version of this file can be found at the lmi website.