In reading about personal finance, you may have come across references, often hushed and worshipful, to a mysterious thing called Monte Carlo analysis.  Perhaps you wondered:  What is it?  Is it really the gold standard for financial planning?  Are there any alternatives?  If this sounds like you, read on!   What is it? Monte Carlo analysis, developed by mathematician and nuclear scientist Stanislaw Ulam while working at Los Alamos in the 1940s, is an important tool for modeling a complex system when a key variable is unpredictable, but whose possible values can be described with a distribution (such as a bell curve).  Monte Carlo essentially substitutes an entire probability distribution…