I have been using Chat GPT to plug in my current assets, projected portfolio growth, expected inflation, and different scenarios to try to determine what I will be able to spend monthly post tax based on different scenarios. Within the next year, I probably need to really firm up a decision as to choosing a retirement date.


Using AI, I was "told" the 3 best softwares to perform Monte Carlo style analyses are the above. I have an IRA with Empower, but I have never used their software to pull in any other accounts. I have no idea how useful their software is.

I have investment accounts with Schwab, which does also pull in and update my Empower IRA upon prompting.
Obviously, I would like something that would sync with Schwab but let me do projections of portfolio growth, anticipated further contributions, tax consequences, retirement timeline, etc.
Right now I am not concerned with Roth conversion planning, but that will obviously come into play upon retirement.

Based on the above, any recommendations from people who have used any of these?
Thanks in advance.

I've been using Boldin for my retirement planning.

Empower's platform is formerly Personal Capital which was the gold standard at one point. The consensus I've seen from many is that Empower has degraded that platform post purchase. We still have access to it via my wife's 401k at Empower and I use it as a tertiary data point. The problem I have with it is that it can't handle identification of municipal bonds and we have a muni bond ladder that is ever changing which means I would have to very frequently manually assign those bonds in Empower. Ain't nobody got time for that so our allocation is always wrong at Empower.

I've played with Boldin and Projection Lab. Those are fairly sophisticated and will require some setup, but if you like this stuff it could be fun.

I use Tiller for personal finance (spreadsheet based tool), but it's not great for investments other than just showing account balances and projections and assumptions at the account level. It's fantastic for banking/credit card transactions tracking, budgeting, and a lot of other stuff but investment allocation is totally manual. They have some beta stuff they are rolling out to bolster the investment side but it's not there yet.

AI probably solves my issues listed here and I can actually link ChatGPT or Claude directly into Tiller now, but I'm still too gun shy to put my financial data into an AI tool.

My FA's firm uses eMoney Advisor which is owned by Fidelity and is used by other firms as well. It's an aggregator but since my muni bond is actively managed by him I can see fund level information in there and he runs all of our Monte Carlo analysis from their stuff. I just don't really like the eMoney tool but it's where I go if I want to see the real details of our investments.

Those of you using Boldin, what Monte Carlo percentage do you shoot for?

I have seen retirement influencers who brag about it but then target 95%+ percentage which was way too conservative. I think it might be a byproduct of the "gamification" nature of Boldin, though I have heard they have started to do a better job of explaining the results.

80% is what they recommend. If you use guardrails, you can go lower.

I use Boldin for retirement planning and Monarch for tracking accounts and net worth. Our current Boldin plan shows 99% chance in Monte Carlo projections.

FYI…you can easily use Chat GPT (or other) to run a Monte Carlo analysis, no different than what your FA is doing. I have been going balls deep in analysis on my bridge years, and frankly the analysis/monte carlo results / but also real time discussion is becoming significantly deeper than what I have received from FA.

And what's really cool….at the end I generate an executive memo in about 10 seconds, and hand it to my wife so she understands wtf is going on!

If you are going to use one of these softwares to optimize Roth conversions, my understanding is that you want to use post tax funds to pay the cost of the Roth conversion. If you plan to do things that way, wouldn't a robust software aimed at helping you decide on Roth conversions need to know the cost basis of any funds you plan to sell to pay for that? Otherwise, you are getting a capital gains hit in order to reduce ordinary income? That may or may not be the correct way to look at it, but such is my understanding.

Boldin is extremely thorough.
You can probably get ai to do some high level analysis but it still makes errors so you'd have to double check everything. At least that's the problem I'm still having. It will forget whether it's using real vs nominal, change my assumptions, or skip steps almost every time I try to get it to do any kind of complex analysis. I haven't tried Claude though.

Boldin has AI now as well - so you can ask it questions.

Leeman said:

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80% is what they recommend. If you use guardrails, you can go lower.

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That's good they recommend that now. The DIY YouTubers I see using it brag about their 98%+ scores and it's like wow you guys are seriously underspending in retirement

To OP, it looks like Boldin specifically handles Roth conversions, but I'm sure you saw that. I'm going to run the 14 day trial with it and see how I like it. I've been hesitant to pull trigger on another financial app only because my FA already provides everything that Boldin does but it's only $12 per month if I keep it and I like having access to my own stuff.

Right on cue……

AgOutsideAustin said:

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Right on cue……

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Dow is up 32 pts right now. Just went to 112%.

YouBet said:

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To OP, it looks like Boldin specifically handles Roth conversions, but I'm sure you saw that. I'm going to run the 14 day trial with it and see how I like it. I've been hesitant to pull trigger on another financial app only because my FA already provides everything that Boldin does but it's only $12 per month if I keep it and I like having access to my own stuff.

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I think once I start doing Roth conversions I am definitely going to want to employ Boldin or some other software to help me optimize tax-wise.

A few years ago, my financial advisor did a formal Monte Carlo analysis for me, but in retrospect I put in much lower spending levels than I want going forward in retirement. Right now, I am pretty much just trying to work backwards from what I want to be able to spend monthly and determine how much I need to have in my post tax accounts and stress test what I have under differing market conditions going forward.

Thanks for all of the help and I would appreciate your input after you go through the 14 day trial.

Yep, we are planning to do Roth conversions this year and next and that's one of the reasons I'm going to play with this. And meeting with FA in a few weeks so I want to be more educated going into that.

So, my Boldin trial ends on Tuesday and I'm still trying to decide if I keep this. They just rolled out a new Investments section if you haven't logged in lately.

Good development but half of our holdings are not being accounted for in our accounts. Some of our larger accounts look as if only 1 of x holdings are actually being recognized. So, the total balance of the account is accurate but it's only seeing one of the many holdings inside that account and therefore missing quite a bit of our allocation.

I assume they will get this fixed, but that's not going to work going forward unless they do.

edit: apparently this Investment view is brand new. I just did a survey for them and told my issues.

I tried the Boldin trial, but eventually went with ProjectionLab. I've leaned into using the tool quite a bit and it is tremendous. I'm able to model every single quirky aspect of my financial plan, and it works with my inputs incredibly well. I really like that I can create lots of variations to the base plan, as well as put in flexible spending 'guardrails' to model dramatic market changes. ProjectionLab is very much worth $100/year to me.

MyMamaSaid said:

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I tried the Boldin trial, but eventually went with ProjectionLab. I've leaned into using the tool quite a bit and it is tremendous. I'm able to model every single quirky aspect of my financial plan, and it works with my inputs incredibly well. I really like that I can create lots of variations to the base plan, as well as put in flexible spending 'guardrails' to model dramatic market changes. ProjectionLab is very much worth $100/year to me.

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Does PL have your investment accounts down to the individual funds that are in the account, or does it just handle account balances?

edit: nevermind. They do not. I don't necessarily mind periodically updating account balances since they are just more of a projection tool, but connections would be nice.

Yeah, might be nice if PL updated balances but not an important aspect for me.

What is really helpful for me is the flexibility to create so many different account, income and expense line items, each one with ability to set start/end dates, monthly/quarterly/yearly occurences, taxation considerations, inflation applicability, etc, etc. My personal situation got super complex about 10 years ago and I've been able to build it all out because PL allows for more than 40 line items for accounts, income, expenses, assets, etc.

If you cancel the paid version of boldin they will give you a discount code to try and keep you. When I tried it out last year before they raised the price they offered lowering the price from $120 a year to $96 a year so not a huge discount but I think they recently went to 144 per year.

One of my use cases is actually solved now with my existing Tiller sub. I didn't realize they were now importing all of your specific holdings inside your accounts. Ran across that yesterday and then used AI to build Allocation dashboards and analysis from the raw data.

Boldin looks to have started that capability, but it wasn't working so I cancelled the trial. I think ProjectionLab might actually be a better fit for me at this point because I really just want it for what it does - projecting and forecasting. I don't need holdings level data in that for now.