In 2024, our mission was to empower you to confidently take control of your financial future, enabling bold choices that align with the life you truly want to live. To achieve this, we focused on delivering financial planning software that adapts seamlessly to your unique needs, offering powerful yet user-friendly tools for continuous planning and meaningful progress.
We emphasized not just creating plans, but fostering planning habits—because while plans may change, the process of planning is indispensable. Throughout the year, we prioritized your most-requested features and introduced a groundbreaking environment to enhance your understanding of financial wellness.
As we reflect on the past 12 months, here’s a look at the Planner milestones that defined 2024. And the best part? There’s so much more to look forward to in 2025!
Financial Wellness Score and Assessment on 15+ Different Metrics
Last Summer we released what we hope becomes a new industry standard for assessing financial health. And, we remain excited about the overall Financial Wellness Score and metrics. Depending on your profile, we look at 15+ measures of your financial health and give you a clear, actionable snapshot of how you are doing.
- You can see your strengths and how to take advantage of them.
- Plus, discover areas where you could improve and get steps for how to do better
It’s like a credit score but for all aspects of your overall financial well-being.
Here are all of the metrics being tracked (though not all metrics are currently available for all profiles):
Retirement
Income and expenses
Tax
Savings and debts
Home and real estate
Life and legacy
Today and Future Dollar Toggle
This was one of our most requested features.
You can now easily toggle between seeing your projections in either future dollars or today’s dollars.
Use the “Forecast” button (the first icon to the right of the Scenario dropdown) in the top navigation and toggle between the two values.
Customize Your Withdrawal Order
Another feature that was at the top of your most requested list for some time was being able to customize the order of accounts for withdrawals. Now you can now play with a custom withdrawal order to try to optimize your finances. (And, toggle back to the traditional order anytime.) See a demo here.
Retirement Withdrawals Report
With the Retirement Withdrawals Report you can dig into the timing, amounts, and account sources for your withdrawals.
Better Net Worth Tracking
Plus users can now view month-over-month changes to current net worth. See the delta on your Overview. This is a first step toward better tracking and monitoring of your wealth over time.
My Plan Scenario Summary
We added a page My Plan Summary page that enables you to see a snapshot of the scenario you are in. Easily review if each topic is complete and PlannerPlus subscribers can review all of the milestones associated with that scenario.
Daily Classes
Coach Nancy is now there for you daily (Monday through Friday) to help you make the most of your planning.
Evolving Support Options
We make every effort to offer answers to your questions as quickly as possible and are improving our use of AI to get you quicker and more personalized answers, but will always be here, in person, to make sure you are getting the answers you need.
Support options include:
- Help center: Since we are not online 24/7, try the Help Center when you are stuck. You’ll likely find the answer you need. Use the search function to find what you are looking for.
- In-app messaging: Look for the circle icon in the lower right corner of your Planner screen. Send us your questions. We are here to help.
- Coaching: We offer 1:1 coaching to help you make sure your data is answered correctly and to walk you through how to answer your questions using the Planner. Fifty minute planning sessions are $250.
- Fee-only advice: Want more support? Collaborate with a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER professional from Boldin Advisors to identify and achieve your goals.
Dividends
We have added a dividend feature for qualified dividends in after-tax accounts. This improves the tax accuracy of plan projections.
Here is an article and video demoing the dividends feature.
Connections and Continued Efforts to Improve Account Linking
Boldin links your accounts through all of the top financial data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, and MX) to give you the best chance of connecting all your accounts and keeping them in sync.
We recently reduced the number of connections in need of repair from 3,600 to under 500. And, have improved the updating of accounts significantly.
Account linking is a challenging area for the entire financial services industry. There is tremendous variability in how financial institutions share data, including frequent changes to login protocols, security measures, and API connections. Additionally, data syncing can be disrupted by factors such as multi-factor authentication requirements, server outages, or delays in aggregator updates.
While account linking will always be a challenge, we’re excited to continue working to improve this feature for our customers.
More Accurate Ways to Model Your Paycheck Deductions and Employer Contributions to Savings
Retirement savings are the foundation of a secure future. And, employers offer many different benefits to employees who save. This year Boldin enabled paycheck contributions and paycheck deductions.
Apply to Plan for Roth Conversions
You can now automatically apply your Roth Conversion Explorer suggestions to your active scenario.
This much-anticipated update makes it easy to add the suggested conversions and then see the impact on your Chance of Retirement Success and other key analyses.
IRMAA Analysis and Enhancements
We added IRMAA estimates to numerous charts and released an IRMAA insights page.
Enabling Additional Account Types, Including Inherited IRAs
We added 403b, 457b, Roth 401k, Roth 403b, and Roth 457b accounts. This update enables more accurate tax projections and contribution limits. For example, the Planner now allows the annual aggregate contribution limit on 401k or 403b and 457b accounts.
Check to make sure you have chosen the right account type for your assets.
Inherited IRAs
For Pre and Post SECURE Act Inherited IRAs and diverse beneficiary types. This feature enables users to easily account for Inherited IRAs including required distributions and any associated income tax liability. The enhancement supports increased ease of use, discovery of opportunities, and more accurate financial planning.
We assess the distribution rules you must follow and model a default withdrawal strategy. Learn more about the inherited IRA feature here.
Gender Options
We added two additional options to Gender: Prefer Not to Answer and Nonbinary or Gender non-conforming.
Fixes and Bugs
We are always on the look out for typos, fixes and bugs and work hard to fix these in a timely manner.
Cash Balance Pension
If your employer offers a cash balance pension, you can now model this in the Planner.
Required Distribution Report
This will allow users to more accurately understand their Required Distributions from retirement accounts and Inherited IRAs.
Use the report to understand IRS regulations and avoid penalties. The information will also enable better decisions about alternate distribution strategies.
Annual State, Federal, and Other Default Data Updates
We keep our model updated with the latest information.
- On Jan. 1, 2025 we again updated federal tax rates, Medicare estimates, and Social Security wage limits.
- State updates will be made in batches in the first few months of the year.
- Last year we also updated our defaults for long-term care costs since they had risen significantly.
Have your projections changed with the latest update?
Industry Awards and Recognition
In 2024 we received numerous prestigious industry awards and were covered in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, MarketWatch, and more. We are proud of what we are building and thank you for your support and suggestions for how to continuously improve.
Your Favorite Features
Beyond everything we added this year, we wanted to take a moment and celebrate the features that you seem to love the most about the 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 to either advisors or direct to consumers.
Learning and Discovery: Many of you are well-versed in planning and have built in-depth spreadsheets of your own. But, we hear that the Planner teaches even the oldest and wisest dogs some new tricks.
Scenarios: What makes Boldin so powerful? You love running scenarios. Scenarios are a great way to explore any possible future and build confidence that your desired lifestyle can be sustained under myriad conditions.
- Scenario Comparisons: What’s better than building a scenario? Comparing that scenario to your baseline plan to make informed decisions.
- Forecast Comparisons: In addition to comparing scenarios, you can compare your optimistic, pessimistic, and average forecasts to gain insights into your future financial health under a variety of conditions.
Roth Conversions and Taxes: Tax Insights and the Roth Conversion Explorer are two of our most popular features for people nearing and in retirement.
What’s Coming for 2025?!
We are proud of our commitment to constantly evolving the Planner and all of our content and services to enable you to live the life you want. In addition to continual enhancements to Roth conversions and other modeling tools, we intend to make the Planner easier to use and help you keep your plans up-to-date and relevant.
Stay tuned for exciting releases in 2025 for the future you want no matter what happens.
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