Overly optimistic retirement plans due to quirks in Boldin
I have been tripped up by two quirks in Boldin related to retirement plans of which I think many users may be unaware. Falling prey to them made my retirement plan overly optimistic and could have led me to spend more in early years jeopardizing chances for a safe retirement.
Quirk 1 - Boldin may lead the user to think that by indicating they plan to use real estate equity to cover long term healthcare some action will be taken to reflect that in the plan - by, for example, adjusting the future value of their home to reflect using it to pay those expenses.
In actuality, Boldin does absolutely nothing when that option is selected. IMO at a minimum it should explicitly tell the user that they need to modify their plan by, for example, selling the home or borrowing against its value to increase assets and then adding corresponding expenses in their plans.
Quirk 2 - Boldin considers expenses entered as "One-Time Expenses" to be future value - not adjusted for inflation over the intervening years. So, for example, if a user models a long-term care expense of $120K per year for 3 years prior to end-of-life, Boldin assumes that the actual expense in those years will be $120K each year in then-year dollars. Obviously, this is wildly optimistic given the historic rates of inflation for such services. IMO it should treat all expenses (both recurring and one-time) as current year dollars and adjust them for inflation.
Falling prey to either of these quirks could result in an overly optimistic retirement plan - potentially wildly so.
I've pointed out these issues to the Boldin AI and was told it would notify the developers.