Our great sponsors
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
Wow! Thank you so much for the fantastic and thoughtful feedback. This is truly excellent and super helpful.
You're right that the needs of people at or near retirement (especially early retirement) are much more complex and comprehensive than those that are further from it: people closer to retirement have more types of investments and income (pensions), tax optimizing your retirement drawdowns is super important, social security relevant (it's better for younger folks not to count on it). This is part of the reason that there's a lot more whitespace in the market there – there's a lot more to build! We're planning to get there one day, but it takes time.
You're right we're targeting younger families right now. They still have plenty of questions, but their financial situations are generally much more uniform. We're big fans of the BogleHeads (it's why we use the 3 fund portfolio in our plan) and Mr. Money Mustache - they do a great job with general purpose advice, but we've found it hard to make actionable. These articles can't answer questions like how much later will I need to retire if I buy a bigger house? Or how much should I save in my 529? It's really impossible for most people to figure that out right now.
Thanks for pointing out some inadequacies in our FAQ. This is super helpful, we'll get it up to date. I'll also try to respond to everything here. Please let me know if I missed anything.
- Takes into account capital gains. But it didn't ask any basis information about my brokerage balance. Does it guess? What value did it use?
We assume your cost basis is 100% for the initial balance with the manual inputs (if you don't sync your accounts via Plaid), and we track the cost basis and tax impacts of future buys and sales when running our simulations.
- Takes into account income tax. It didn't ask my breakdown of stocks/bonds in the brokerage account or in my retirement accounts. How are dividends and interest handled?
The simulation today essentially assumes that you follow our recommended stock/bond allocation, but we're working to open that up.
We take income tax into account for traditional retirement fund distributions and capital gains. Dividends and interest payments are rolled into gains (admittedly this does understate their tax impact when the savings are in taxable accounts).
- There is no way to separate traditional retirement accounts from Roth type accounts which have very different tax treatments.
Yep, for the onboarding flow we keep things simple - we only ask for one "Retirement savings" number. But you can add a Roth account (and any other number of accounts) after onboarding.
- Social Security needs to be modeled. The free open source tools at https://ssa.tools and https://opensocialsecurity.com contain the minimum that you need to model. The question "Should I work one more year?" is a common one and one you need to handle.
Thanks the links! Super useful. We'll check them out. We don't model Social Security yet - it's tough to forecast how much younger folks should count on it, so we've left it out for now.
- Health care is not even on the list of things ignored and it's one of the biggest questions for folks retiring early. It has huge effects on federal taxes and the ACA cliff caused some folks to keep their income artificially low. IRMAA [3] is also a concern for some folks.
- A common question for early retirees is should I do a Roth conversion or should I take advantage of the 0% capital gains bracket? Modeling the RMDs and the taxes on that is complex, but absolutely necessary to properly answer this question.
Completely agreed on both. Early retirees have a lot of really complex needs that we really can't help with (yet).
- Ignoring state taxes can give misleading answers to some of the questions above. I live in a state that taxes capital gains as income, like many states. So when I take advantage of the 0% federal cap gains bracket, my state taxes can be 3-4x my federal taxes.
Handling state taxes is on the roadmap. There are a lot of states! For most of our demographic, the impact is expected to be small on the percentage change change of outcomes.
Wow! Thank you so much for the fantastic and thoughtful feedback. This is truly excellent and super helpful.
You're right that the needs of people at or near retirement (especially early retirement) are much more complex and comprehensive than those that are further from it: people closer to retirement have more types of investments and income (pensions), tax optimizing your retirement drawdowns is super important, social security relevant (it's better for younger folks not to count on it). This is part of the reason that there's a lot more whitespace in the market there – there's a lot more to build! We're planning to get there one day, but it takes time.
You're right we're targeting younger families right now. They still have plenty of questions, but their financial situations are generally much more uniform. We're big fans of the BogleHeads (it's why we use the 3 fund portfolio in our plan) and Mr. Money Mustache - they do a great job with general purpose advice, but we've found it hard to make actionable. These articles can't answer questions like how much later will I need to retire if I buy a bigger house? Or how much should I save in my 529? It's really impossible for most people to figure that out right now.
Thanks for pointing out some inadequacies in our FAQ. This is super helpful, we'll get it up to date. I'll also try to respond to everything here. Please let me know if I missed anything.
- Takes into account capital gains. But it didn't ask any basis information about my brokerage balance. Does it guess? What value did it use?
We assume your cost basis is 100% for the initial balance with the manual inputs (if you don't sync your accounts via Plaid), and we track the cost basis and tax impacts of future buys and sales when running our simulations.
- Takes into account income tax. It didn't ask my breakdown of stocks/bonds in the brokerage account or in my retirement accounts. How are dividends and interest handled?
The simulation today essentially assumes that you follow our recommended stock/bond allocation, but we're working to open that up.
We take income tax into account for traditional retirement fund distributions and capital gains. Dividends and interest payments are rolled into gains (admittedly this does understate their tax impact when the savings are in taxable accounts).
- There is no way to separate traditional retirement accounts from Roth type accounts which have very different tax treatments.
Yep, for the onboarding flow we keep things simple - we only ask for one "Retirement savings" number. But you can add a Roth account (and any other number of accounts) after onboarding.
- Social Security needs to be modeled. The free open source tools at https://ssa.tools and https://opensocialsecurity.com contain the minimum that you need to model. The question "Should I work one more year?" is a common one and one you need to handle.
Thanks the links! Super useful. We'll check them out. We don't model Social Security yet - it's tough to forecast how much younger folks should count on it, so we've left it out for now.
- Health care is not even on the list of things ignored and it's one of the biggest questions for folks retiring early. It has huge effects on federal taxes and the ACA cliff caused some folks to keep their income artificially low. IRMAA [3] is also a concern for some folks.
- A common question for early retirees is should I do a Roth conversion or should I take advantage of the 0% capital gains bracket? Modeling the RMDs and the taxes on that is complex, but absolutely necessary to properly answer this question.
Completely agreed on both. Early retirees have a lot of really complex needs that we really can't help with (yet).
- Ignoring state taxes can give misleading answers to some of the questions above. I live in a state that taxes capital gains as income, like many states. So when I take advantage of the 0% federal cap gains bracket, my state taxes can be 3-4x my federal taxes.
Handling state taxes is on the roadmap. There are a lot of states! For most of our demographic, the impact is expected to be small on the percentage change change of outcomes.