Boldin Retirement Calculator

Like any good web-based application, an online retirement calculator should provide an intuitive and consistent user experience. Changes to the user interface should be made infrequently, and then only if absolutely necessary.

These are the hallmarks of a well-designed and managed app. Moreover, they are a sign that equal care was given to the design and implementation of what is under the hood. This is important when the thing under the hood is forecasting your financial future.

Thus describes Boldin’s (formerly NewRetirement) PlannerPlus online retirement calculator. Its easy-to-use, wizard-style user interface hasn’t changed markedly in the five years I’ve used it, making it easy to pick up right where I left off after weeks or months away.

What has changed is the breadth of the feature set, and the depth and quality of those features. This is thanks to Boldin’s commitment to continuous and incremental improvement. PlannerPlus rivals the tools used by Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) professionals, but is accessible to DIY investors at a fraction of the cost.

Related: The First Step to Choosing the Right Retirement Calculator

What’s New?

Last May I reviewed PlannerPlus when it was still branded under the NewRetirement banner. I compared it with Fidelity’s online calculator, and concluded PlannerPlus was superior. This was a revelation considering I’d trusted Fidelity for years to model my retirement burn-down.

Since then, Boldin has added a couple of great new features to PlannerPlus, making the tool even more powerful. Boldin even addressed a nitpick I raised in my first review. Given these (and other) improvements, now is a good time to take a fresh look at PlannerPlus.

Related: PlannerPlus Retirement Calculator Review

Retirement Chance of Success

PlannerPlus greets first-time users with its friendly, wizard-style user interface. It prompts you to supply essential bits of financial information about yourself; account balances and allocations, expenses, expected (or actual) social security benefits and the like.

After just a few minutes of data entry, you’ll be presented with a graphic that summarizes your financial outlook.

The Retirement Chance of Success chart forms the centerpiece of your plan. Based on your inputs, it forecasts your savings balances each year in retirement. It also forecasts your overall chance of success, where success is defined as not outliving your savings.

The light green (top) line in the chart represents your projected savings given average assumptions for portfolio returns, inflation, housing appreciation, and social security cost of living adjustments (more on the definition of average below).

The dark green (bottom) line represents the 90^th percentile of outcomes, meaning that 90% of the Monte Carlo trials run by the tool performed better than (i.e., above) this line given average assumptions.

Methodology

To project outcomes in the Retirement Chance of Success chart, PlannerPlus uses a proven statistical technique called Monte Carlo analysis. It runs hundreds of hypothetical trials, randomly varying historical asset returns and inflation, to produce a range of possible outcomes and their probabilities.

Monte Carlo analysis is the gold standard in financial forecasting. Any serious retirement calculator should use it. PlannerPlus is one of them.

Current vs. Future Dollars

Figures in the chart, and throughout the tool, are displayed in today’s dollars. A convenient toggle allows you to switch between current and future dollars. (I prefer the former, because my brain thinks in current dollars.)

This feature wasn’t available in the version of PlannerPlus I reviewed back in May; figures were displayed in future dollars only. I complained about this in the review. Boldin has since updated the tool.

Charting

In addition to Retirement Chance of Success, PlannerPlus features tons of insightful charts. Take the Lifetime Income Projection chart, for example. It updates in real time to reflect any change you make to your plan, no matter how small. Hover over any bar in the chart, and a popup appears revealing the detail behind it.

One of my favorite features is the Plan Updated Popup. It appears any time I change an input or assumption. This gives me instant feedback on the impact of that change to my plan.

Portfolio Return Assumptions

PlannerPlus uses default portfolio return assumptions to generate its forecasts. It assumes portfolio returns will be 2% annually given pessimistic, and 5% annually given optimistic, market conditions. It takes the arithmetic average of the two—3.5%—to produce a third forecast based on what it calls average market conditions.

I think the defaults are too conservative, so I override them with values that are more realistic. To do this, I run a Monte Carlo analysis on each of my accounts based on the historical returns of their current asset allocations. Here is a table that summarizes the results.

For each of my accounts, I select the 10^th percentile of outcomes for my pessimistic portfolio return assumptions, and the 50^th percentile for my optimistic return assumptions. I plug these values into the tool, thereby overriding the defaults.

For example, in the data entry form for my Roth IRA, I enter 4.87% and 6.71% for pessimistic and optimistic return assumptions, respectively.

Now, in the summary view that contains all my accounts, PlannerPlus displays the rate of return it will use for my Roth IRA, or 5.79%. This number is the average of my estimated pessimistic and optimistic return assumptions, and reflects my current selection in the tool for overall rate assumptions.

Other Rate Assumptions

In addition to portfolio return assumptions, PlannerPlus supplies default rate assumptions for general inflation, medical inflation, social security cost of living adjustments and housing appreciation.

The defaults seem reasonable to me, so I leave them alone. All the same, I find it instructive to tinker with them to understand their impact on my forecasts and/or chance of success.

My return and inflation rates now set, with a single click of the mouse I can switch between optimistic, average, and pessimistic outcomes to see their effect on my financial plan.

Expense Estimates

PlannerPlus features a Detailed Budgeter that allows you to enumerate your expenses in as fine a detail as you wish. True to its overall design philosophy, PlannerPlus gives you an easy way out. For expense estimates, this is the Basic Budgeter. Here you enter a single, monthly number and you’re done. In either case, the tool adjusts expenses for inflation annually based on current rate assumptions.

I prefer the Detailed Budgeter. It lets me separate each expense category into must-spend and like-to-spend components. This gives me fine-grained control over what falls into essential and discretionary buckets.

Just like for optimistic, average and pessimistic rate assumptions, PlannerPlus gives you a one-click toggle between your must-spend and like-to-spend budgets, so you can see at a glance the difference in impact belt-tightening (or loosening) makes to your financial forecast.

Outcomes

Based on my profile, and using average rate assumptions, PlannerPlus gives me a 99% chance of funding my retirement through age 100 (this is depicted in the first Retirement Chance of Success chart displayed above).

If I switch my rate assumptions to pessimistic, however, PlannerPlus gives me just a 60% chance of success.

While a 60% chance of success may seem bleak, it’s important to put this number into context.

For one thing, the chart nevertheless indicates I have a 90% chance of making it to 2061, the year I would turn 95 (God willing!), without running out of money. For another, living to 95 is a pretty conservative assumption if the actuarial oracles are to be believed.

Finally, and most important, this (or any) forecast is a snapshot based on current facts and future assumptions. As time passes, and those future assumptions get replaced by actual facts, the snapshot will change. With each new snapshot comes the opportunity to adjust behavior, the plan or both, if necessary.

New Features

I mentioned in the intro a couple of new features Boldin added to PlannerPlus since my last review. These are too important to gloss over, so I’ll go over them in some detail in the sections that follow.

I already mentioned one improvement; the ability to display figures in current or future dollars (previously, figures were displayed in future dollars only). I singled this out as a drawback in my previous review. Kudos to Boldin for adding this feature.

Custom Withdrawal Order

To determine what it considers to be the most favorable withdrawal order in retirement, PlannerPlus groups your accounts by tax treatment (after-tax, pre-tax and tax-free), prioritizing the groups from least to most tax advantaged. Within each tax group, it further prioritizes your individual accounts by return rate, sorting them from lowest to highest.

PlannerPlus calls this traditional withdrawal order, and uses it by default to forecast your overall chance of success.

But what if you don’t want to follow the conventional advice? Say instead you prefer to draw from your traditional IRA first, in order to mitigate the impact of income taxes on your RMDs later in life. PlannerPlus addresses this by allowing you to model your own, custom withdrawal order.

Here I’ve dragged my Traditional IRA to the top of the list, ahead of my after-tax accounts, to see the effect of my change.

As ever, the Plan Updated popup delivers the news. The good news is that I’ll pay $385k less in taxes over the course of my lifetime. This is what I expect, since I’ll pay tax on smaller RMDs from my then-depleted traditional IRA.

The bad news is that I’ll have $290k less in terminal savings! That’s because the estimated return on my traditional IRA is 6.51%, which is better than the combined returns on my now-deprioritized after-tax accounts. By tapping my traditional IRA first, I am trading those better returns now for lower taxes later.

The upshot is that, all else equal, I’ll be better off in the long run tapping after-tax accounts first. Alternatively, I could allocate my traditional IRA less aggressively, and/or my after-tax accounts more aggressively, to net more in terminal savings using the IRA-first strategy.

Caveats

Of course this is all purely hypothetical. The effect of changing the withdrawal order of my accounts, and/or the asset allocations within them, depends entirely on the return and rate assumptions I’ve supplied to the tool. Actual returns and rates will almost certainly be different.

Playing with withdrawal order is nevertheless a useful exercise, as it could bring to light concerns that might not otherwise occur to you.

Retirement Withdrawals Report

Another great new feature is the Retirement Withdrawals Report. It provides insights into the impact of different spending strategies on your portfolio over time. The Retirement Withdrawals Report is based on inputs and selections you make in three areas:

• Withdrawal strategy (based on spending needs, fixed percentage or maximum spending)
• Budgeter scenario (expense estimates from the Basic or Detailed Budgeter)
• Portfolio withdrawal order (see previous section for elaboration)

Given my inputs and selections in these areas, the report tells me I will spend 3.1% of my portfolio per year, on average, throughout my retirement.

Further, it tells me how much I will need, and from what sources, in each year of retirement. The Retirement Withdrawals Report presents the information in both chart and table form.

The part of the report I find most interesting, however, is its side-by-side comparisons of different withdrawal strategies.

In these charts I see both withdrawal amounts and savings balances, year over year, for each of the three withdrawal strategies: spending needs, fixed percentage and maximum spending.

I have no intention of using a fixed-percentage spending strategy in retirement, much less one based on maximum spending. (I am way too risk-averse to attempt the die-with-zero approach!)

Instead I tailor my withdrawals to my immediate spending needs, and plan to continue to do so. I model this strategy in PlannerPlus by using the Detailed Budgeter (discussed above). With the Retirement Withdrawals Report, I can see the effect of this strategy relative to the others.

The wide gap between need-only and maximum spending in these charts gives me confidence that I am on the right track.

Last Word

The visuals in the Retirement Withdrawals Report are a perfect example of what I love about PlannerPlus. The tool gives me a variety of interesting, unique and complementary ways to scrutinize my financial plan.

Pricing

A PlannerPlus subscription will set you back $120/year, billed annually. That’s just $10/month for access to all the features I presented in this review (and many more I did not). Within minutes, you can put these tools to work to model your financial future.

If you’re reluctant to pay for a subscription, give Boldin’s Basic offering a try. Although not as richly-featured as PlannerPlus, it is absolutely free. You can use it as long as you like with no obligation to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Boldin offers a third option—Boldin Advisors—for $1,650. Boldin Advisors comes with all the features of PlannerPlus, but in addition you get access to online courses and Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) professionals.

Disclosure

Finally, in the interest of full transparency, the PlannerPlus links in this review tell Boldin you heard about them from us. If you purchase a subscription via one of these links, Boldin compensates us with a modest reward. We put any such compensation toward the cost of running this site.

So, if you like the content you get here from Chris, Darrow and/or me, and you decide to purchase a PlannerPlus or Advisors subscription, please consider doing so via this link, or any of the other Boldin links scattered throughout this post.

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[I’m David Champion. I retired from a career in software development in March 2019, just shy of my 53rd birthday. To position myself for 40+ years of worry-free retirement, I consumed all manner of early-retirement resources. Notable among these was CanIRetireYet, whose newsletters I have received in my inbox every Monday morning for the last ten years. CanIRetireYet is one of exactly two personal finance newsletters I subscribe to. Why? Because of the practical, no-nonsense advice I find here. I attribute my financial success in no small part to what I have learned from Darrow and Chris. In sharing some of my own observations on the early-retirement journey, I aim to maintain the high standard of value readers of CanIRetireYet have come to expect.]

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