The Boldin Financial Planner Take control of your plans. Retire earlier, with more security and find financial confidence.
Get expert support Make sure your plan is set up correctly with a coach. Or, talk to a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® from Boldin Advisors for even more guidance and support.
Resources Fuel your financial planning know-how
Blog Your guide to financial planning and retirement
April 17, 2026 • 16 minutes
Boldin and ProjectionLab are both serious DIY retirement planning tools, built for people who want to manage their own planning without handing their money to a wealth manager. They’re built around different ideas of what retirement planning requires.
Boldin is a retirement planning system. It guides you through the decisions that define retirement income, with optimization tools, AI grounded in your actual plan data, and one-on-one support from coaches and CFP® professionals. ProjectionLab is a modeling environment built for users who want direct manual control over every input, with historical return sequences.
The right fit depends on where you are and what you’re trying to accomplish. This breakdown covers how they compare on running simulations, Roth conversion strategy, withdrawal-phase modeling, and advisor access.
Both tools appear regularly in roundups of the best retirement calculators. Here’s how Boldin and ProjectionLab compare on planning depth, investment tracking, Roth strategy, pricing, and advisor access.
The Boldin Planner delivers much of what a human financial planner does: it takes your full retirement picture and shows you how your decisions play out together. ProjectionLab is a modeling environment. It gives you direct control over inputs and assumptions, and your projected outcomes update in real time as you adjust them.
Boldin walks you through structured data entry, shows you where your plan can improve, and helps make decisions like Roth conversion timing and withdrawal sequencing accessible to anyone who brings their financial picture to the tool.
ProjectionLab is also built for scenario depth. You can run multiple plan variations side by side and model life milestones with custom timing. What you do with the results is up to you. Its strengths are in historical simulation and flexible scenario construction. Boldin is built to help you structure and make decisions.
That difference sharpens as users approach retirement. Both tools support solid pre-retirement planning. Once you’re drawing from savings, the decisions compound. Social Security timing, RMD sequencing, healthcare costs, and tax management all interact in ways that demand more than a modeling environment to navigate.
Boldin AI is built into the Boldin Planner and answers from your actual plan data. Ask what happens if you retire two years early, whether a Roth conversion makes sense at your income level, or how your plan holds up if markets underperform for the first decade of retirement.
Questions stay in context, so you can follow up without re-explaining your situation each time. Each response links to the relevant section of your Planner, giving you a direct path to act on what you’ve learned.
Boldin AI is available on all plans. Basic users get up to 5 questions per day. PlannerPlus users get up to 200 per conversation with no cap on conversations.
ProjectionLab has no AI assistant and no in-app Q&A. Users work through scenario questions by adjusting inputs directly, changing an assumption and watching projections update in real time, and draw their own conclusions from what they see.
A Monte Carlo simulation runs your retirement plan through hundreds or thousands of randomly generated market sequences to estimate the probability your money lasts. Monte Carlo makes sequence-of-returns risk visible: strong and weak sequences, plus the specific ordering of returns in early retirement that determines whether your plan holds up.
Boldin runs 1,000 simulations, each using a range of return scenarios built around your assumed rate of return. If Boldin shows an 82% chance of success, that means 820 of 1,000 simulated futures ended with money remaining.
ProjectionLab also uses Monte Carlo simulation, up to 2,000 trials, though that ceiling applies to random sampling modes. When running historical sequences, the trial count is constrained by the historical record.
The two platforms differ in what they do with that score. Boldin’s Spending Guardrails feature connects directly to that score. Your Safe Spending Target is calibrated to maintain roughly an 80% success rate, with upper (95%) and lower (70%) thresholds that signal when you have room to spend more or should pull back. ProjectionLab surfaces its Monte Carlo results as a Chance of Success score as well, but leaves interpreting it more to the user.
One thing to know if you run both: because each platform builds its simulation differently, identical inputs can produce noticeably different success scores. That’s expected.
ProjectionLab’s historical backtesting takes a different approach. Your plan runs against every rolling historical period in its dataset. This ties results to real historical markets, but you’re limited by how much market history exists.
Historical backtesting shows how your plan would have held up in past markets. Monte Carlo estimates the probability across a broader range of possible futures, including sequences that fall outside recorded history.
For users who want to see how their plan would have performed in specific documented periods, ProjectionLab’s historical approach answers that question directly. Boldin’s Market Risk Explorer addresses the same concern from a different angle. You can model custom downturns, a decade of poor returns, or a three-year sequence of negative returns as stress tests against your plan.
ProjectionLab is a capable modeling tool, and three things it offers are worth knowing about.
Historical backtesting. ProjectionLab runs your plan against every rolling historical return period in its dataset. For users who want to see specifically how their plan would have held up through the early 2000s, 2008, or other defined periods, that’s a concrete feature grounded in actual market history.
Sankey diagram cash flow visualization. ProjectionLab displays projected income, spending, and asset flows as a Sankey diagram, a visual format that shows how money moves through your plan year by year. It shows which accounts you’re drawing from, how tax-advantaged and taxable money interact, and where cash flow bottlenecks might appear.
Free Monte Carlo access. ProjectionLab’s free tier includes Monte Carlo simulation, historical backtesting, and cash flow visualization. If you want to evaluate probability-of-success modeling and cash-flow views before paying, that access is available without a subscription. Boldin, by contrast, keeps Monte Carlo and its more advanced scenario tools on the PlannerPlus paid tier, while its free plan focuses on building the foundation of a complete plan.
The closer you get to retirement, the more the variables in your plan start affecting each other. Taxes, healthcare, Social Security timing, and required distributions can affect each other in ways you can’t see until you model them together.
Medicare cost modeling. ProjectionLab includes Medicare and IRMAA inputs but doesn’t project them automatically from your age and income. Healthcare costs are easy to underestimate and difficult to project without a framework that connects them to the rest of your income plan. Boldin’s guided Medicare engine automatically projects your future Part B and Part D premiums, supplemental coverage costs, and IRMAA surcharges directly into your retirement cash flow based on your age and income.
Social Security optimization. ProjectionLab models Social Security claiming but treats timing as a standalone input. Boldin integrates it across the full plan, so you can compare claiming ages and spousal benefit strategies and see what timing does to your tax bracket and withdrawal sequencing alongside the monthly benefit figure.
RMD planning. ProjectionLab takes RMDs as a configurable input but doesn’t model the downstream tax effects. Required minimum distributions begin at 73 or 75, depending on your birth year. Boldin models your RMD schedule alongside your other income sources, showing how distributions affect your tax bracket over time and where conversion windows close.
A Roth conversion moves pre-tax money from a traditional IRA or 401(k) into a Roth account, paying income tax on the converted amount now in exchange for tax-free growth and withdrawals later. The strategic question is timing: identifying the window between retirement and RMD age where your tax rate is lower than it will be once Social Security and RMDs both kick in.
Both platforms support Roth conversion optimization toward the same goals: minimizing lifetime taxes, staying below an IRMAA threshold, filling your tax bracket, maximizing estate value. What separates them is how much of your plan each tool is working from.
ProjectionLab’s free tier lets you enter Roth conversion amounts as manual inputs and see how they affect projections. The tool’s Roth Optimizer is a Premium feature. It looks for Roth conversions, drawdown order, and gain harvesting around a tax target. Social Security timing, RMD assumptions, and healthcare costs are separate inputs you configure manually before it runs.
Boldin’s Roth Conversion Explorer, available on PlannerPlus, operates across your full plan. Your Social Security timing, RMD trajectory, healthcare costs, and withdrawal sequencing are already integrated inputs in the Planner. The Explorer pulls from all of it to build a year-by-year schedule around whichever goal you set.
Boldin links directly to financial institutions, so account balances stay current without manual updates. ProjectionLab doesn’t support direct bank or brokerage linking. Balances are entered and updated manually, or imported through a plugin system. Some users may prefer manual entry.
Boldin is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and uses 256-bit encryption across all data. ProjectionLab’s security page documents encryption, secure infrastructure, and privacy-first data handling, but does not currently list a SOC 2 Type 2 audit for the service itself. For users who want to review an independently verified security attestation before connecting financial data, that’s a meaningful distinction.
Boldin offers two levels of human support: coaching sessions at $250 each for plan setup and tool guidance, and flat-fee CFP® professional consultations for full retirement strategy.
Boldin Advisors connects you with a CFP® professional for a flat $3,200. No asset minimum, no ongoing relationship. You get two sessions: an initial meeting to walk through your plan and goals, then a written report. The report covers withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversion strategy, tax planning, and stress testing. It’s built for people who’ve put a plan together themselves and want a professional to pressure-test it before they act.
ProjectionLab is a software tool with no advisory layer. There’s no CFP access and no structured plan review built into the platform. The tool runs the model. What you do with the results is up to you. If you already know how to act on what the model shows, that’s enough. Same if you’re working with an outside advisor. If you’re not sure what the outputs mean for your decisions, the platform won’t tell you.
At $144 versus $129 per year for ProjectionLab Premium, the price difference is small enough that it shouldn’t drive the decision. What matters more is what each paid tier unlocks.
ProjectionLab’s free plan already includes Monte Carlo and backtesting; paying upgrades to the full feature set. Boldin’s free plan is a solid planning foundation. PlannerPlus is where the core planning system lives: Monte Carlo, Roth Conversion Explorer, up to 10 side-by-side what-if scenarios, Medicare and Social Security modeling, and full Boldin AI access.
ProjectionLab rewards people who want direct control over every variable and prefer to do their own analysis. Boldin is for people who want the tool to structure the hard decisions and do more of the analytical work.
The withdrawal phase is where the difference is most concrete. RMD timing, Social Security coordination, drawdown sequencing, and tax management across income sources all interact in ways that compound quickly. Boldin is designed to help you navigate that.
Reviewers who have tested both tools tend to reach for the same distinction: Boldin as a comprehensive retirement planning system, ProjectionLab as a modeling environment for scenario exploration.
Rob Berger, who has evaluated most of the major planning tools available, is direct about where he lands personally. “Boldin is what I use to plan our retirement,” he writes. He describes it as covering retirement income projections, Monte Carlo analysis, tax planning, Roth conversions, Medicare, and Social Security in one platform.
In his ProjectionLab review, Berger characterizes it as a financial planning simulator that enables users to run virtually unlimited scenarios and model their path to financial independence. “ProjectionLab is fairly numbers-intensive, and best designed for those who like to crunch a lot of numbers when it comes to finance,” he writes.
At Marriage Kids and Money, Andy Hill describes Boldin as “an exceptional financial planning tool” that lets users “fine-tune the decisions you make around every aspect of your financial life,” pointing to its depth across taxes, income, real estate, Medicare, and long-term care.
Hill describes ProjectionLab as good for early retirement scenario modeling and praising its Monte Carlo depth and what-if flexibility. “The clean interface makes it easy to get the insight you need,” he writes. “Even though there is a bit of a learning curve, the clear visuals will appeal to any user.”
Craig Stephens at Retire Before Dad calls Boldin “the gold standard in retirement calculators.” He describes it as “the most comprehensive financial tool I’ve ever used,” noting that people closer to retirement will prefer the mature tools and calculators Boldin provides. “Boldin is an over-the-top complete financial planning tool,” he writes.
In his ProjectionLab review, Stephens describes it as a powerful tool suited to DIY planners who want to build and modify scenarios on their own terms. “Boldin steps you through creating and modifying your plan rather methodically, while ProjectionLab asks some questions upfront. Then, planners use a freestyle approach to modify and tweak inputs,” he writes. “ProjectionLab doesn’t have as many features as Boldin yet.”
For users approaching or in retirement, Boldin offers a meaningfully deeper planning system. It handles Social Security coordination, RMD timing, drawdown sequencing, tax management, and healthcare costs as interconnected decisions, with optimization tools built into the workflow. ProjectionLab is a capable scenario tool for retirement enthusiasts who want to build and run scenarios with manual control and historical return sequences. For users who want guidance through real retirement decisions rather than a sandbox to run them in, Boldin is the stronger choice.
ProjectionLab’s free tier includes Monte Carlo simulation, historical backtesting, and cash flow visualization. Boldin’s free Basic plan covers income, expenses, Social Security, and a long-range projection, which is a solid foundation for building a complete plan. Monte Carlo, Roth optimization, and scenario comparison tools are available on Boldin’s PlannerPlus tier.
Both platforms run Monte Carlo, but differ in what they do with the results. Boldin runs 1,000 simulations and connects the output directly to its Spending Guardrails feature, which calibrates a Safe Spending Target around an 80% success rate. ProjectionLab runs up to 2,000 trials and surfaces a Chance of Success score, but leaves interpreting it to the user.
Boldin is the stronger fit for people within five years of retirement or already there. Withdrawal-phase planning involves decisions that interact in complex ways: when to claim Social Security, how to sequence drawdowns across account types, how required minimum distributions affect your tax picture, and how healthcare costs fit into an income plan you’re actively managing. Boldin is designed to handle those interactions together.
Boldin AI is built into the Boldin Planner and answers questions from your actual plan data: your accounts, income sources, assumptions, and projections. Ask scenario questions in plain language, follow up on the answers, and see how they change your plan. Basic users get up to 5 questions per day; PlannerPlus users get up to 200 per conversation with no cap on conversations.
Boldin Advisors offers a flat-fee, two-session engagement with a CFP® who reviews your plan and delivers a written withdrawal and tax strategy. The flat fee is $3,200, with no assets under management required and no ongoing relationship. The advisor acts as a fiduciary throughout.
At $144 per year for Boldin PlannerPlus versus $129 for ProjectionLab Premium, the price difference is small enough that it shouldn’t drive the decision. ProjectionLab’s free plan includes Monte Carlo and backtesting; paying upgrades to the full tool. Boldin’s free plan is a foundation; PlannerPlus is where the core planning system lives: Monte Carlo, Roth Conversion Explorer, up to 10 side-by-side scenarios, Medicare and Social Security modeling, and expanded Boldin AI access.
Take financial wellness into your own hands and do it yourself retirement planning: easy, comprehensive, reliable.
Risk comprehension is the weakest financial literacy domain in 2026, and age doesn’t fix it. See why six in 10 Americans struggle with financial decisions.
Boldin vs. Empower, Fidelity, MaxiFi, Quicken, and 7 more tools — features, pricing, and which one fits your situation.
Empower shows you what you own. Boldin models whether it lasts. Here’s how they compare on planning depth, tax strategy, and advisor access.
