Bouldin Summary: Are you taking advantage of everything we’ve unleashed in 2024? (And our promise for 2025)

In 2024, our mission is to empower you to confidently take control of your financial future, empowering bold choices that align with the life you really want to live. To achieve this, we focused on delivering a platform that seamlessly adapts to your unique needs, offering powerful, easy-to-use tools for ongoing planning and meaningful progress.

We emphasized not just making plans, but promoting planning habits – because although plans may change, the planning process is indispensable. Throughout the year, we prioritized your most requested features and provided a leading environment to advance your understanding of financial wellness.

As we reflect on the past 12 months, here’s a look at the blueprint milestones that defined 2024. And what’s the best part? There is a lot to look forward to in 2025!

Your favorite features

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

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

Learning and discovery: Many of you are well versed in planning and have created your own in-depth spreadsheets. But we hear that the scheme teaches even the oldest and wisest dogs some new tricks.

Scenarios: What makes Bouldin so powerful? She loves playing out scenarios. Scenarios are a great way to explore any possible future and build confidence that you can maintain your desired lifestyle under countless circumstances.

• Scenario comparisons: What’s better than building a scenario? Compare this 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 circumstances.

Roth Conversions and Taxes: Tax Insights and Roth Conversion Explorer are some of our most popular features for people nearing or nearing retirement.

Score and rate your financial wellness on over 15 different metrics

Last summer we released what we hope will become a new industry standard for assessing financial health. We remain excited about the result and overall measures of financial health. Depending on your profile, we look at over 15 metrics of your financial health and give you a clear, actionable snapshot of how you’re doing.

• You can see your strengths and how to leverage them.
• Additionally, discover areas where you can spot areas for improvement and see what steps need to be taken to do better

It’s like a credit score but for all aspects of your overall financial well-being.

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

Retirement

Income and expenses

tax

Savings and debt

Home and real estate

Life and legacy

Today and future dollar toggle

This was one of our most requested features.

You can now easily switch between seeing your forecast in future dollars or today’s dollars.

Use the Forecast tab (first icon to the right of the scenario drop-down menu) in the top navigation bar and toggle between the two values.

Customize your withdrawal order

Another feature that has been at the top of the most requested list for some time is the ability to customize the order of accounts for withdrawals. You can now play with a custom withdrawal order to try and improve your funds. (And return to the traditional arrangement at any time.)

Retirement withdrawal report

Using the Retirement Withdrawal Report, you can research the timing, amounts, and account sources of your withdrawals.

Best net worth tracker

Plus users can now view monthly changes to net present value. See the delta on your summary. This is the first step towards better tracking and monitoring your wealth over time.

Summary of my plan scenario

We added a “My Plan Summary” page that lets you see a snapshot of the scenario you’re in. Easily see if each topic is complete and PlannerPlus subscribers can review all the milestones associated with that scenario.

Daily lessons

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

Advanced support options

We do our best to provide answers to your questions as quickly as possible and are improving our use of artificial intelligence to get faster, more personalized answers, but we will always be here in person to make sure you get the answers you need.

Support options include:

• Help Center: Since we’re not online 24/7, give it a try Help Center When you’re stuck. You’ll likely find the answer you need. Use the search function to find what you are looking for.
• In-app messages: Find the circle icon in the lower right corner of the Planner screen. Send us your questions. We are here to help.
• Training: We provide live training to help you make sure you answer your statements correctly and guide you on how to answer your questions using the chart. Fifty-minute planning sessions are $250.
• Tip for fees only: Want more support? Work with a Certified Financial Planning Professional™ from Boldin Advisors to set and achieve your goals.

Dividends

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

Communications and ongoing efforts to improve account linking

Boldin connects your accounts through the best financial data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, MX) to give you the best chance of linking all your accounts and keeping them in sync.

This is a challenging area for the entire financial services industry. There is tremendous variation in how financial institutions share data, including frequent changes in login protocols, security measures, and application programming interface (API) connections. Additionally, data synchronization can be disrupted by factors such as multi-factor authentication requirements, server outages, or delays in pool updates, resulting in inconsistent or outdated information for users.

However, we remain committed to delivering better performance.

More accurate ways to model your payroll deductions and employer contributions to savings

Retirement savings are the foundation of a secure future. Employers offer many different benefits to employees who save. This year Bouldin enabled salary contributions and salary deductions.

He learns more…

Applies to a Roth conversion plan

You can now automatically apply Roth Conversion Explorer’s suggestions to your active scenario.

This long-awaited update makes it easier to add suggested transfers and then see the impact on your chance of retirement success and other key analytics.

IRMAA analysis and improvements

We added IRMAA estimates to several charts and released an IRMAA Insights page.

Learn more about IRMAA.

Enable additional account types, including inherited IRA accounts

We added 403b, 457b, Roth 401k, Roth 403b, and Roth 457b accounts. This update allows for more accurate tax projections and contribution limits. For example, the scheme now allows for a total annual contribution limit on 401k or 403b and 457b accounts.

Check to make sure you’ve chosen the right account type for your assets.

Inherited IRA accounts

Before and after the IRA and its various beneficiary types. This feature allows users to easily calculate inherited IRAs including required distributions and any associated income tax liabilities. Optimization supports increased ease of use, opportunity discovery, and more accurate financial planning.

We evaluate the distribution rules you should follow and model a hypothetical withdrawal strategy.

Sex options

We’ve added two more options to gender: I’d rather not answer and non-binary or gender non-conforming

Fixes and bugs

We are always looking for typos, fixes, and errors and work hard to fix them in a timely manner.

Pension cash balance

If your employer offers a cash balance pension, you can now design this into the scheme.

Distribution report required

This will allow users to more accurately understand 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 to be made about alternative distribution strategies.

Annual, federal and other default data updates

We keep our form updated with the latest information.

• On January 1, 2025, we again updated the federal tax rates and estimates for Medicare and Social Security wage limits.
• Status updates will be made in batches in the first few months of the year.
• Last year we also updated our default settings for long-term care costs as they rose significantly.

Have your expectations changed with the latest update?

Industry awards and recognition

In 2024, we received several prestigious industry awards and were covered in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MarketWatch, and more. We’re proud of what we’re building and thank you for your support and suggestions on how to continually improve.

What’s coming for 2025?!

We are proud of our commitment to the continued development of the scheme and all our content and services to enable you to live the life you want. In addition to continued improvements to Roth conversions and other modeling tools, we intend to make Planner easier to use and help you keep your plans current and relevant.

Stay tuned for exciting releases in 2025 for the future you want no matter what happens.