What is "First Point Below Minimum" and "Time Below Minimum" in the Income Example Scenarios table?

Income Lab helps advisors and clients explore possible income experiences that could be produced when following a given dynamic income plan. These "below minimum" measures report on if, when, and for how long households would have had income below their essential monthly income.

• First Point Below Minimum measures how far into retirement, measured from the current point in the plan, that a household would have had income below its essential monthly income in a given test scenario.
• Time Below Minimum is the amount of time, measured in months, that a given test household would have lived with income below their essential monthly income level.

If a scenario includes times when income was below minimum, the shorter the amount of time spent below minimum, the less this would have hurt the household. Also, the later into retirement that income goes below minimum, the less impact this may have had on the household, since it is less likely that the household would have reached this point at all.