Anyone have a recommendation on a financial planning software that does a good job at modeling a Go Go, Slow Go, No Go strategy? My own proprietary company software does a lousy job at that method and I am looking for one I can purchase myself. Additionally, my wife and I are looking at SS integration with her pension to front load that income during early retirement and we will be attempting to pull from Roth accounts during early retirement to maximize ACA subsidies so it needs to account for that as well.
I am not opposed to paying a fee-only entity if they can model all this sufficiently either but I would prefer to do it myself if such a solution is available to the public.
Gemini recommends Boldin and ProjectLab but both of those recs are linked to someone’s paid YouTube vid so I can’t take those recs at face value. Looking for personal recommendations.
Hawkwin
Who knows he can retire, but needs this to convince his wife - who rightly assumes I am biased in my analysis.
Boldin will do all that. Sometimes you have to dig a little bit to find all the features, but you can have expenses that end or begin in the future, select withdrawal order of accounts, model Roth conversions, etc. It has an AI chat feature that actually works. You just say “I want 10 years of Go Go” and it will enter all the inputs for you and spit out the answer.
My wife got the Boldin subscription because she wasn’t 100% sure if she could retire. It gave her the validation she needed and now she has a countdown widget on her lockscreen.
A calc can’t run a Monte Carlo simulation. I know I can plug in any 'ole percentage but I am not counting on the next five years of returns being as good as the last five years - and as stated up thread, this is about convincing the Mrs. and not about convincing me.
I don’t think there are any good ones. I’m not sure, but I suspect that is because this kind of financial planning is so individualized that any tool would need to observe you and your finances for a few years (ideally for your entire [adult] life) to determine what is best for you.
Since the early days of the Retire Early discussions (mid-to-late 90s) on various boards and blogs and social media, I have searched for such a tool, to no avail.
Someone cynical (paging @intercst) might say that all the financial institutions have no incentive to ever create such a tool because if the tool were “truthful”, it would routinely advise people to stay away from most of the services those institutions provide at a way-too-high cost.
Fire calc does exactly that (Montecarlo analysis).
Set the duration for the GG period. Pick the bottom of the range.
Take result at Bottom.
Set the duration and details for SG period. Pick bottom of range.
Take results at Bottom
Set the duration for end of life NG period. Look at range…
Straight forward. Pick bottom, pick 25% line. do 50%… etc. etc. etc.
cfiresim allows you to make multiple adjustments to your spending and income during retirement. You can specify various withdrawal methods such as the traditional 4% as well as a Guyton-Klinger guardrails others I don’t recognize. I don’t think it does Monte Carlo, though.
They also are pitching a new tool, FIREproof, that I haven’t looked at yet.
