r/Boldin

Here are questions that tend to get useful answers from real users: Value and Fit:

•	Did Boldin change a decision you’d have made differently? What was it?
•	Is it worth paying for if I already use a spreadsheet, or a free tool like FIRECalc or Fidelity’s planner?
•	Is the paid tier worth it over the free tier? Which features did you actually use?
•	For people who canceled, why?

Features that matter at 50s age:

•	How well does it model Social Security claiming age, Roth conversions, and RMDs?
•	How accurate is the tax modeling (federal and state)? Does it handle IRMAA and ACA subsidies for early retirement before Medicare?
•	How does it handle healthcare costs and long-term care?
•	Can it run “what if” scenarios, like retiring at 60 vs. 65, a market downturn early on, or a spouse’s income changing?

Accuracy and reliability:

•	Does it use Monte Carlo simulations or fixed return assumptions? Can I adjust them?
•	Do account links (Plaid) stay connected, or do you end up entering things manually?
•	Have you compared its results to a fee-only planner’s, and did they match?

Practicalities • What does it cost now, and have prices gone up since you joined? • Is it easy to cancel and get a refund? • How does it handle pensions, rental income, or a business sale? • What was the learning curve, and is the support responsive? .​​​​​​​​​​

Currently , I use free tools like empower or fidelity for crunching numbers.

I just finished my 2 week trial of Boldin and wanted to see what others thought of a couple of the beta features available in the product. I tried 2 features that I believe were beta status during my trial (AI assistant and the Roth explorer). I found both features to be of very poor quality and was surprised they were available for broad usage. The roth explorer would never complete an analysis for me when I asked it to optimize for maximum net worth even though I had all the parameters at the most permissive settings. The AI assistant gave me blatantly incorrect information on at least 3 occasions and on one other spewed so much output that it was unusable.

Boldin is a financial product and have to admit I was kind of shocked to see clearly not ready for production features included. I cannot imagine Intuit doing this with Turbotax or Quicken.

Did I just have an especially bad experience with the beta features I tried to use, have others found them to be accurate and useful?

I haven't used the investments feature until today.

I have 9 linked accounts(all Fidelity) that pull in the correct totals.

Only 4 of 9 are actually pulling in the individual investments. For the ones that don't there is a note that says "This account is connected — positions and values sync automatically". Oddly the four pulling investments have no note about being linked although they are.

The issue I see is that only four show the actual investments and their totals making the whole section useless.

Am I missing something obvious or maybe have a linking issue?

Periodically I see people posting about spending hours tweaking a plan. I have started playing with Boldin and ProjectionLab but haven’t made a life decision based on their outputs (yet). The smallest event I have modeled as of now is $60k for home improvement a couple of times. The smallest recurring expense is $6k/month for CCRC fees.

How granular do you get?

I spend several weeks creating and modifying a very detailed scenario that I was very happy with and was actually my retirement plan. Yesterday I logged in and it was gone!! All support told me is that they were sorry, didn't know how it happened and would try to restore it but they were not sure they could. This is maddening since I spent so many hours working on it not to mention I just reupped for another year! I am afraid to try to create new plan based on this experience. I think I will be taking at look at Projection Lab now.

Investments today > Fund fees (beta) page looks very useful and makes having your account holdings connected or entered in via ticker symbol manually (or AI automated) worthwhile. No wonder the brokerage companies don’t usually have this kind of table – they don’t want to highlight their higher-fee managed investments alongside low cost index funds, much less list them in order of expense. This makes it easy to identify the taxable holdings that I will be looking to put in the beginning of the withdrawal order sequence when the time comes and when paying cap gains isn’t as much of an issue.

I’ve been an index investor most of my life, so it’s nice to see my average expense ratio is pretty low: 0.102%.

​ I completed a Roth conversion this week and updated my account balances in Boldin. However, the software is modeling future conversions at a much lower amount because it seems to be double-counting the withdrawal—treating the conversion as still pending against my updated, reduced balance.

Since the funds have already left the account, Boldin assumes I’ll be short on cash for future conversions, which won't actually be the case.

Is there a way to mark a Roth conversion as "Completed" or force Boldin to recognize that current account balances already reflect the conversion?

I do not want to just delete the conversion in money flows so it does not mess up the tax calculations.

Thanks,

Received an email about them raising the price to $168/year. Gotta pay for those AI tokens, I guess.

I've had a mixed reaction to the new Investments feature in Boldin. I really like the Today pane, and the calculated asset allocation across all accounts. I'd like to see that same % view, rather than just $, for each individual account as well. But I do like this feature.

What I would really like is for Boldin to take these asset mixes, and offer the user a customized rate of return for each account, that they could select instead of the Aggressive/Moderately Aggressive etc preset values. Having gone to the trouble of computing the asset mixes for each account, why not go one step further and compute a customized rate assumption?

I know this is one of the top questions users have when building their retirement model: what rate assumption should I use?

As for the Investments > Future panel, I don't see the value. This is perhaps a philosophical argument, but I see Boldin as a retirement modeling tool, and I'd like them to focus their efforts on enhancing that capability.

I don't want that effort spent on offering investment advice. There are other tools for that purpose.

Hi - I’m kicking around putting my investment account details into Boldin’s investment tracker. I think it would help fine tune my returns by dialing in exactly what asset classes are in each account. Over 50% of my investments are in a single IRA. Inside of the IRA I have a portion in safe TIPS ETFs and a portion in total market ETFs. Does it make any sense to split this into two accounts?

I could create an account for the safe bucket and a separate one for the growth bucket. I’d at the withdrawal order to hit the safe bucket first.

Would this be worth trying?

We are currently using eMoney that comes with our Planvision plan for our pre-retirement and retirement plan.

FWIW, we are about 3-4 years away from retirement.

The best part of Planvision is we can reach out and ask for second opinion from an actual person to review.

At this point, we are pretty DIY and have decent idea about our plan, what to avoid, etc.

The downside for me, the eMoney is quite locked down that it is tough to make adjustments and what ifs scenarios.

I am considering Boldin and wondering if it is more powerful vs the eMoney version that comes with Planvision.

If we go with Boldin, we do not plan to pay for their advisor service, just the software plan.

Does anyone have experience with these two apps?