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June 4, 2026 • 13 minutes
Quick answer: Boldin is the strongest choice for full, ongoing retirement planning. It connects taxes, Social Security, healthcare, and withdrawal strategy in one plan. An AI assistant answers from your actual numbers. Need pure day-to-day budgeting instead? Monarch or Quicken handle that.
A full retirement plan touches more than your bank balance. Budgeting, investment tracking, taxes, turning savings into income, and the big questions behind all of it: when can you retire, how much do you need, will your savings last.
This piece compares 13 of the best retirement planning tools against Boldin. We drew on independent reviews, user feedback, and what each tool is built to do.
Boldin connects taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and withdrawal strategy inside one plan. You skip reconciling separate tools yourself. Independent reviewers and users point to the same strengths:
Basic is free to start. PlannerPlus adds Monte Carlo simulation, the Roth Conversion Explorer, and unlimited Boldin AI for $144 a year. It comes with a 14-day free trial. See current pricing and the full feature comparison.
ProjectionLab is a modeling sandbox. It’s powerful for building your own projections by hand. But it’s built around manual entry and single-tool depth, not a connected system. Its free tier includes Monte Carlo simulation and historical backtesting.
It stops short of a full planning system in two ways. Account linking is limited; most entry is manual, by design. There’s no AI layer to answer questions about your plan or act on it. Boldin’s model works differently: tax, Social Security, Medicare, and withdrawal sequencing live in one plan that updates as your numbers change. Boldin AI works from your actual data.
Cost: Free; Premium is $129 a year.
Read the full comparison of Monte Carlo methodology, tax planning, and withdrawal-phase modeling in ProjectionLab vs. Boldin.
Both Boldin and Pralana Gold are detailed, powerful planning tools built for individuals. The real difference is the interface. Pralana runs as a guided Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with lengthy documentation to walk you through it. It’s comprehensive, but interpreting the output falls on you. There’s no AI to ask, no live account view, no plan that updates itself.
Boldin is a web-based, connected experience. You get in-app help, a searchable help center, live and recorded classes, and an AI layer that answers questions about your actual plan.
Cost: About $99 as a one-time purchase (Pralana’s web-based Online tool, a separate product, runs $89–119 a year as a subscription).
MaxiFi and Boldin both run tax projections, Social Security claiming strategies, and Monte Carlo simulations. That’s the baseline math any serious retirement tool runs. The two tools split on what they do with those numbers. MaxiFi is an optimizer. It takes your inputs and returns a single number: the highest sustainable spending level your income and assets can support. Boldin is a planning system built around your full financial picture. It produces a Chance of Success score and guidance you can revisit as your situation changes.
Harry Sit of The Finance Buff bought MaxiFi Premium to model a real housing decision. He ran straight into the tradeoff in its Monte Carlo output: a spending range swinging from $50,000 to $200,000 a year, depending on market returns. There was no clear signal for which number to plan around. As he put it, “So do I spend $50,000 or $200,000?” Jim Dahle of The White Coat Investor calls MaxiFi “a worthy competitor.” But he names Boldin “the first one you should check out” and “certainly the only one you need.” He adds that the plan it generated was “far higher” in quality “than I have seen come from many professional financial advisory firms.”
Cost: Standard is $109 a year; Premium, which adds Monte Carlo and the Roth Optimizer, is $149 a year.
Read the full comparison of consumption-smoothing versus Chance of Success methodology in MaxiFi vs. Boldin.
Right Capital is built primarily for financial advisors managing client plans, not for someone building their own. The scenario tools and tax modeling are genuinely strong, but reaching them usually means going through an advisor first.
A Reddit user testing both directly found less of a gap for hands-on scenario work: “In my experience, Boldin was more flexible and intuitive.”
Cost: Available primarily through financial advisors.
Read the full comparison in RightCapital vs. Boldin.
Empower, formerly Personal Capital, is one of the most widely used free retirement tools. Its strength is investment monitoring: account aggregation, fee analysis, asset allocation tracking, and net worth dashboards. Its Retirement Fee Analyzer flags hidden fund costs, something Boldin doesn’t offer an equivalent for.
Empower falls short on planning depth. It doesn’t model withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversion windows, or tax strategy across future years. Those are the decisions that matter most in the years around retirement. Many people run both: Empower for investment monitoring, Boldin for everything else.
Rob Berger has used Empower for over a decade to track his portfolio and evaluate fees. He calls it “the absolute best investment tracking app” for that purpose. But for his own retirement planning, he uses Boldin.
Eric Rosenberg, writing at The White Coat Investor, draws a similar distinction. Boldin suits action-oriented financial planning. Empower stands out for investment analysis and wealth management.
Cost: Empower’s tracking and planning tools are free. Its optional wealth management service starts at a tiered 0.89% AUM fee, with a $100,000 minimum. That rate steps down to 0.49% on dollars above $10M.
See the full comparison of planning depth, Roth strategy, and advisor access in Empower vs. Boldin.
Fidelity offers low-cost investments and a straightforward planning tool alongside them. It doesn’t go as deep as Boldin on comprehensive, ongoing planning.
Rob Berger, reviewing Fidelity’s retirement calculator, calls it “a very easy to use tool to get a rough, and I stress rough, idea of your retirement readiness,” and makes the broader point that “a retirement calculator, in contrast to a retirement planner, can only do so much.” Fidelity’s tool also works from a single profile. Change an assumption and it overwrites what you had, with no way to hold two scenarios side by side. Boldin lets you build and compare multiple scenarios at once. That includes Roth conversion and Social Security timing questions Fidelity’s tool doesn’t model.
Cost: Free. Registration is required if you don’t already hold a Fidelity account. You may get sales outreach depending on your asset levels.
Income Lab is retirement income planning software built for financial advisors. It’s priced at $199 to $299 a month for practices. The focus is dynamic spending strategies and ongoing plan monitoring, not a one-time projection. There’s no direct consumer or DIY tier.
Boldin is built for individuals, without needing an advisor relationship to access the software. If you’re comparing the two because an advisor mentioned Income Lab, start with Boldin’s Basic plan on your own. Decide later whether you need professional guidance layered on top.
Cost: Not available directly to individuals; priced for advisor practices.
eMoney is an enterprise platform built for wealth management firms. It’s optimized for cash-flow modeling and advisor-facing client presentations, not for day-to-day use by an individual running their own numbers.
One investor compared their CFP’s eMoney output against their own Boldin plan and found the two converged closely: “so now the two software are remarkably similar.” The difference came down to control. Boldin let them adjust Roth conversion timing and spending directly, without waiting on an advisor to rerun the model.
MoneyGuide Pro, another advisor-only platform, follows a similar pattern. It leans on visual probability-of-success scores rather than granular tax and withdrawal mechanics, and shows up often at firms like Schwab. One user had a Schwab advisor run a MoneyGuide Pro analysis alongside their own plan in NRP, Boldin’s product under its earlier name, and found the two held up well against each other: “I had my Schwab account manager run their Money Guide pro analysis and NRP compared very well.”
Cost: Both are available only through a financial advisor.
Monarch Money is a budgeting and net worth tracking tool. It’s closer in scope to Quicken or Mint than to a retirement planning platform. It’s added basic goal tracking and long-term net worth projection. But it doesn’t model Social Security claiming strategy, Roth conversions, or tax-bracket withdrawal sequencing. That’s the retirement-specific planning Boldin’s tools handle.
Cost: Free for basic tracking; the paid tier runs $99 a year.
Quicken, like Empower, serves a different purpose than Boldin. It’s built for tracking transactions and historical spending. Boldin’s budgeting tools exist too, but the focus is projecting spending forward, not reconciling what already happened. Quicken also asks you to enter a manual tax rate to model retirement income. Boldin calculates taxes automatically each year against current law, including scheduled changes.
Cost: Quicken Simplifi runs roughly $48 to $72 a year; Quicken Classic runs roughly $48 to $96 a year, depending on tier.
Other budgeting-focused platforms worth knowing about: Monarch Money, Tiller, Rocket Money, and YNAB.
A good advisor brings real value. You get intuition built from experience, a broader view of your options, and reassurance that’s hard to get from software alone. But traditional advice comes with real tradeoffs. It’s often cost-prohibitive. Annual or quarterly meetings don’t answer the weekly “what if” questions that come up between visits. And it can be hard to find an advisor who understands your values and covers more than savings and investments.
Cost: Traditional financial advice typically runs into the thousands of dollars a year, depending on the scope of service.
FireCalc is where people go to sanity-check a number, not to build a plan. It’s a free, one-page tool: answer a few questions, and it charts hundreds of possible outcomes based on historical market data. FireCalc’s own site frames the read this way — don’t follow any single line; look at the mass of lines against the zero axis to see how often a strategy would have failed or succeeded.
FireCalc doesn’t save your data between visits, model taxes or Roth conversions, or account for Social Security claiming age. It isn’t built to.
Cost: Free.
OnTrajectory is a DIY projection tool, lighter in scope than Boldin. It’s useful for modeling income, expenses, and goals on your own. It has less built in for the choices that matter most as retirement gets close. Its paid Unlimited plan ($80–99/year) adds Monte Carlo simulation and historical backtesting. It also includes an AI assistant, Penny, for basic guidance and getting started.
What it doesn’t have: a dedicated Roth conversion optimizer comparable to Boldin’s Roth Conversion Explorer, or an in-house path to a CFP®. Advisor access instead runs through a separate referral and affiliate program. Boldin’s AI works differently, too. Rather than general guidance, Boldin AI answers from your actual plan data. On PlannerPlus, it can draft updates to your plan for you to review. Roth strategy, Monte Carlo, tax planning, and CFP® access all live together in one connected plan.
Cost: Free tier available; the Unlimited plan runs $80–99 a year.
Boldin is the strongest overall choice for comprehensive, ongoing retirement planning. It connects taxes, Social Security, healthcare costs, and withdrawal strategy in one plan. An AI assistant answers using your actual numbers.
Paid retirement planning software earns its cost once your situation has moving parts a static number can’t capture: Social Security claiming age, Roth conversion timing, healthcare costs, or sequencing withdrawals across several accounts in retirement. Free tools cover a single point-in-time estimate: how much you might need, or whether your current savings are on track.
For planning, Boldin is better than Empower. Empower is built for free investment tracking and fee analysis, and does that well. Boldin goes further into retirement income planning, Roth conversion strategy, and tax modeling. Many people use both for different purposes.
Right Capital and MoneyGuide Pro are both professional tools, typically accessible only through an advisor. Boldin is built for a different audience: the individual managing their own plan. It covers the same core decisions (tax strategy, Social Security timing, Roth conversions) without requiring that advisor relationship.
Boldin used to be called NewRetirement. The name changed; the platform and tools carried over.
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