Boldin Review: Are you taking advantage of everything we have in store for 2024? (and our commitment to 2025)

In 2024, our mission is to empower you to take control of your financial future with confidence and make bold choices that align with the life you really want. To achieve this, we focus on delivering a platform that adapts seamlessly to your unique needs, providing powerful and user-friendly tools for ongoing planning and meaningful progress.

We emphasize not only making plans, but also cultivating the habit of planning—because although plans may change, the process of planning is indispensable. Throughout the year, we prioritized the features you need most and introduced groundbreaking environments to enhance your understanding of financial health.

As we look back on the past 12 months, we take a look at the Planner milestones that will define 2024. There’s much more to look forward to in 2025!

Your favorite features

In addition to everything we’ve added this year, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate the features you seem to love most about Boldin Planner:

Comprehensive and flexible: We still have features to add, but we believe that we are by far the most complete and comprehensive planning tool available for advisors or direct-to-consumers.

Learn and discover: Many of you are well versed in planning and have built your own in-depth spreadsheets. But we’ve heard planners teach even the oldest and wisest dogs some new tricks.

Application scenarios: What makes Boldin so powerful? You enjoy running scenarios. Scenarios are a great way to explore any possible future and build confidence that the lifestyle you want can be maintained under a variety of conditions.

• Scenario comparison: What’s better than building a scene? Compare this scenario to your baseline plan to make an informed decision.
• Forecast comparison: In addition to comparing scenarios, you can also compare your optimistic, pessimistic, and average forecasts to gain insight into your future financial health under various conditions.

Roth Conversions and Taxes: Tax Insights and Roth Conversion Explorer are two of our most popular features for near-retirees and retirees.

Financial health scores and assessments on over 15 different metrics

Last summer, we released what we hope will be the new industry standard for assessing financial health. And, we remain excited about the overall financial health scores and metrics. Based on your profile, we look at more than 15 metrics that measure your financial health and provide you with a clear, actionable overview of your financial health.

• You can see your strengths and how to leverage them.
• Additionally, you can identify areas for improvement and understand the steps you need to take to improve them

It’s like a credit score, but touches every aspect of your overall financial health.

Here are all the metrics being tracked (although not all metrics are currently available for all profiles):

retire

income and expenses

Tax

savings and debt

Homes and Real Estate

life and legacy

Today and Future Dollar Toggle

This is one of our most requested features.

You can now easily switch between displaying your forecasts in future dollars or current dollars.

Use the “Predictions” tab in the top navigation (the first icon to the right of the scenario dropdown) and toggle between the two values.

Customize your withdrawal instructions

Another feature you’ve been asking for the most for a while now is the ability to customize the order in which your accounts are withdrawn. Now you can use custom withdrawal instructions to try and optimize your finances. (And, you can switch back to traditional order at any time.)

Pension Withdrawal Report

With the Retirement Withdrawal Report, you can gain insight into the timing, amount and account origin of withdrawals.

Better net worth tracking

Additionally, users can now view month-to-month changes in their current net worth. See Increment in Overview. This is the first step to better tracking and monitoring your wealth.

Summary of my project scenario

We’ve added a new My Project Summary page, allowing you to view a snapshot of your scene.

daily lessons

Coach Nancy is now available daily (Monday-Friday) to help you get the most out of your program.

Evolving support options

We make every effort to get answers to your questions as quickly as possible and are improving our use of artificial intelligence to give you faster, more personalized answers, but we’ll always be there in person to make sure you get the answers you need.

Support options include:

• Help Center: Since we are not online 24/7, please try the Help Center when you get stuck. You may find the answers you need. Use the search function to find what you’re looking for.
• In-app messaging: Look for the circle icon in the lower right corner of the Planner screen. Send us your questions. We are here to assist you.
• Tutoring: We provide 1:1 coaching to help you ensure you are answering your data correctly and walk you through how to use Planner to answer your questions. The fee for a fifty-minute planning session is $250.
• Fee-only suggestions: Want more support? Work with the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professionals at Boldin Advisors to identify and achieve your goals.

dividend

We’ve added a dividend feature for qualified dividends in after-tax accounts. This improves the tax accuracy of plan forecasts.

Connections and ongoing efforts to improve account linking

Boldin links your accounts through all the top financial aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, and MX), giving you the best chance of connecting all your accounts and keeping them in sync.

This is a challenging area for the financial services industry as a whole. There are huge differences in how financial institutions share data, including frequent changes to login protocols, security measures and API connections. In addition, data synchronization may be interrupted due to factors such as multi-factor authentication requirements, server outages, or delays in aggregator updates, resulting in inconsistent or outdated user information.

That being said, we remain committed to doing better.

A more accurate way to model your payroll deductions and employer savings contributions

Retirement savings are the foundation for a secure future. And, employers offer many different benefits to employees who save. This year, Bouldin enabled payroll contributions and payroll deductions.

learn more…

Apply for Roth Conversion Program

Now you can automatically apply Roth Conversion Explorer suggestions to your campaign scenarios.

With this highly anticipated update, you can easily add recommended conversions and see the impact on your chances of retirement success and other key analytics.

IRMAA analysis and enhancement

We’ve added IRMAA estimates to a number of charts and published the IRMAA Insights page.

Learn more about IRMAA.

Enable additional account types, including inherited IRAs

We have added 403b, 457b, Roth 401k, Roth 403b and Roth 457b accounts. This update enables more accurate tax forecasts and contribution limits. For example, the planner now allows total annual contribution limits for 401k or 403b and 457b accounts.

Check to make sure you have selected the correct account type for your assets.

Inherited IRA

Applies to inherited IRAs and different beneficiary types before and after the SECURE Act. This feature enables users to easily account for inherited IRAs, including required distributions and any associated income tax liability. This enhancement supports improved ease of use, opportunity discovery, and more accurate financial planning.

We evaluate the distribution rules you must follow and model a preset withdrawal strategy.

Gender options

We’ve added two additional options to “Gender”: “Prefer not to answer” and “Non-binary” or “Gender non-conforming”

Fixes and bugs

We’re always on the lookout for typos, fixes, and bugs and work hard to fix them in a timely manner.

cash balance pension

If your employer offers a cash balance pension, you can now model this in the planner.

Required Allocation Report

This will allow users to more accurately understand required distributions from retirement accounts and inherited IRAs.

Use this report to understand IRS regulations and avoid penalties. This information will also help in making better decisions regarding alternative distribution strategies.

Annual state, federal and other default data updates

We update our models with the latest information.

• On January 1, 2025, we updated federal tax rates, Medicare estimates, and Social Security wage limits again.
• Status updates will be delivered in batches over the first few months of the year.
• Last year, we also updated our long-term care cost defaults because long-term care costs have increased significantly.

Will your predictions change with the latest updates?

Industry Awards and Recognition

In 2024, we received a number of prestigious industry awards and were featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MarketWatch, and more. We’re proud of what we’re building and appreciate your support and suggestions on how to continue to improve.

What will happen in 2025?

We’re very proud of our commitment to continually improving Planner and all of our content and services so you can live the life you want. In addition to continually enhancing Roth transformations and other modeling tools, we intend to make Planner even easier to use and help you keep your plans current and relevant.

Stay tuned for an exciting release in 2025 to achieve the future you want, no matter what happens.