r/Boldin

I retired earlier this month! I am appreciating Boldin for helping create a retirement plan (which I know is still in development and I suspect will be adjusted quite a bit in the coming months). But I have two questions: [1] What tools (apps, websites, etc.) other than a retirement planner are helpful once you are in retirement? [2] In what ways can Boldin continue to be helpful once you are living your retirement plan?

Hi All: I've been struggling with the decision to continue paying for software like Boldin and/or Projection Lab. I've been retired for 2 years now (as of today!), and I've been using Boldin for a little over 2 years. Regardless of what I do to my plan to stress-test it, my chance of success is always 99%. I have to basically double my annual spending to get the plan to drop below 99%.

Not saying any of that to brag, but it makes me wonder why I need to continue paying for Boldin just to update my account values each quarter or year just to look at the new numbers.

As far as tax planning, Roth conversions, Social Security strategy, etc, it seems like there are so many other free tools out there for doing those things. In fact, I find it very confusing to use Boldin for those things because Boldin doesn't really know all my exact investments and/or nuances of how we spend and move money around. It all seems based on estimates, averages, and best guesses. I'd tried using the Roth conversion explorer in Boldin, but it never seems to meet my needs. I'm trying to do small Roth conversions each year while also staying under a certain MAGI for ACA subsidies. If I'm careful and intentional, I can actually do Roth conversions while owing very little or zero tax each year, which still getting a pretty high subsidy.

To do that in Boldin, I feel like I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to match up with that I'm trying to accomplish. But I can figure it out myself using a basis spreadsheet.

Anyway... I'm rambling. Just wondering what other retired folks think about continuing to pay for tools like Boldin when your retirement plan is already pretty solid. Is it worth it? Would other free tools like Empower, Fidelity's retirement planner, FiCalc, or others serve pretty much the same purpose?

I've looked for information such as a "day in the life" of a retired Boldin user to get better insights into how folks are using it. 🙂

When I logged into Boldin today, it opened a cash flow graph with the title of, "Your First “Aha” Moment". There's no text saying why this has been presented to me or what 'Aha' I'm supposed to be getting from this. Does anyone know?

Having an odd interaction with Boldin.

Asked the AI if it noticed anything requiring my attention. It responded that I might want to address the "Tax Bomb" imposed by my RMDs as I approach age 90, where it computed over $900K/year in taxable income.

I politely inquired WTF, as my income is nowhere near that level. Verified I was using Average outcomes.

AI apologized for the confusion and doubled down on the Tax Bomb at $900K.

We repeated the dance a time or two, and I gave up. It was apparently hallucinating.

So I printed my report and exported my values to a spreadsheet, to explore at leisure later.

I found that the PDF report, for Average settings, did contain a ~$900K income total for a few years around age 90, which is an error. The spreadsheet export was as expected, and did not show $900K.

Does the AI consume the PDF file?

Anyone else see anything similar?

ETA: The AI may have been quoting Future Dollars, though I have selected Today's Dollars for display. The AI may fail to make the translation from Future / computed dollars to my selected display in Today's Dollars?

Hi. I'm still trying to figure Boldin out. I live in New York State and I'm about to retire. My retirement income will come largely from my CUNY 401(a) which is not NYS taxable. Boldin doesn't know that. NY does have state income tax on retirement income, but CUNY retirement is excluded. What the best workaround for this in Boldin?

Very basic at the moment.

I have a traditional TSP and a traditional 401(k), both in roughly equal amounts. Boldin's RMD modeling is initially pulling RMDs only from the TSP for, I presume, the combined RMD amount for the two accounts. Once the TSP is drained, it starts taking RMDs from the 401(k).

But don't the IRS rules require that RMDs be made from both accounts each year?

In the early stages of exploring Boldin. I have 401K, Roth-IRA, T-IRA, Savings, Bonds. I will want to do Roth Conversions to minimize RDMs. I want to explore different strategies in how/where (not how much) I should pull $X amount from my fund each year. After have setup a Risk based Guardrails strategy, which I've done, can Boldin tell me, pull X from 401k/T-IRA this year, and pull X from brokerage?

Also do I need to account for cost basis when deciding which stocks to sell or just sell the lowest cap-gains to allow for step-up of the highest cap-gains when I die? I doubt I will drain the entire account.

I've been using Boldin and other retirement calculators, and I feel pretty comfortable with the projections and chance of success. Since all of my retirement money is in tax-deferred 401(k) or IRAs, I'm curious to know what benefit a financial advisor would be (vs the cost). Other than doing Roth conversions over time, all of my withdrawals will be taxed as income, so I don't know if it's worth having someone advise me on how to withdraw from my accounts over time. It seems pretty straightforward - withdraw what I need, taking into account the income tax I will have to pay on that money. But as they say, "you don't know what you don't know."

I have a decent understanding of how retirement planning works, but it is definitely not my area of expertise. Maybe a one time session with a CFP just to get an overview or info on anything I might have missed would be worth it. Thoughts?

So I just wasted a solid half-hour with the in-app AI tool, trying to eliminate IRMAA and setup our medical expenses properly. It simply can't be done. The methods for both 'estiamted' and 'itemized' expenses don't fix it, no matter how I zero it out.

Supposedly the AI opened a ticket for me, but I'm not holding my breath for any human at Boldin to look at the issue it opened. 😞

I'm just wondering if anyone has gotten it working properly if you and your spouse aren't going to be using Medicare Part B.

What are the best videos out there to tell me how to use Boldin properly? It’s fairly self explanatory in many ways. But I’m having trouble understanding what it means in some charts. Like when I have enough $ with 99% chance of success and yet a bar graph showing me shortages in this or that account and what if anything to do about it. Got any video suggestions?

Edit- thanks I didn’t realize there were videos in the app itself.

Does boldin software work well with a federal retirment? Fers pension, fees supplement, special provision (atc) and tsp?

For the past several months I've been evaluating and testing the 4 major LLMs / AI environments to create a financial plan for myself and subsequently a few friends.

The result is several magnitudes greater than anything I've had before, but each one is very specific to each person, due to age, state of residency, filing status, sources of income, list of objectives - a laundry list of things effect a good plan.

I tried to get Claude (my tool of choice) to create a template that I could share with others as a Do-It yourself prompt document or .py script depending on their expertise. Unfortunately, this proved impractical due to all of the complexities mentioned above. Even Claude warned that this was going to be impractical as any output would be too specific and confusing for most to use.

So, instead I have created (with the help of Claude) a How-To get started guide. While this should work with any LLM, I've only tested extensively in Claude. As for Free or Pro - you could get started with Free, if you are willing to both use it after prime time hours (M-F 8am to 2pm EST) and weekends, and 'continue' a lot, but it may get you started. OR - spend $20 and jump in with both feet.

This is the link if any are interested is a shared, web published google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSDAUUn7oRZYv-YqdlJ0X2IBnS70rGeAADYlvjNZObtft0v3FVgNcThmbvFwkXRKXKmpQBpvm8KG6Jp/pub

Even though I have used AI to create my plan and it does many things Boldin (and others) cannot, it also exemplifies why something this broad would be very difficult, if not impossible, for Boldin or anyone else to implement. Boldin is great for what is and is improving. I still use it to backtest, visualize and create FPs for my adult children. BUT - it has limits on what it practically can be expected to do. It's great for those who are <40 with more typical needs. But for old codgers like myself or someone with more complex needs, this may provide you some information that is helpful.

All questions/comments welcome.

Hello, I use Boldin and am thinking about using their ability to link to my brokerage accounts. Trying to understand how many people do this and if there are risks.

View Poll

I know there's a guardrails calculation, but is there a way to have that implemented into the model and re-calc the chance of success? I'm trying to validate what I was able to do in AI.

Is the chance of success just overly pessimistic or is there a flaw in its calculation?

I have a scenario that assumes a 40 year retirement with an average withdrawal rate of 2.9%/yr. Withdrawals peak around 5% in the first decade due to Roth conversions, which Boldin still treats as a withdrawal for some reason. Then after the Roth conversions are complete, the withdrawal rate drops to about 3% and eventually down to about 1.5%. So the actual spending rate is probably closer to around 2%. However, with average inflation and returns, Boldin says this scenario has an 80% chance of success.

This just does not pass the sniff test. Wade Pfau's study in 2011 showed that a 2.8% withdrawal rate over 40 years, in conservative market conditions, only failed 1% of the time. In other words a 99% success rate.

Don't get me wrong, I would prefer Boldin error on the side of caution, but this estimate seems way to pessimistic to the point where I think it may be an error. The AI agreed it should be higher. It told me that the low success rate was due to a high legacy goal. I remove that and it had no impact. Next it said it was because of my roth conversions. I removed those and the percentage went down. Then it told me I had a liquidity problem because my brokerage account would be empty before I could pull from the roth, which is nonsense because I am already well past the 5 year rule. Even still I switched to a traditional withdrawal order and the chance of success dropped to 75%.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2544656

Hello reddit,

I'm trying out Bolden now. We've tracked our expenses for years so I have a pretty good handle on our "must spend" vs "like to spend" in our categories.

When does "Must spend" have any affect on anything in the detailed budgeter?

As an example, in the sheet I'm playing with, I have a chance of success rate /Monte carlo of 99%.

If I now add a Travel line, with Must Have: $5000 and "Like to spend": $5000, then the chance to success and monte carlo drops to 81% success. Fair enough.

What I don't understand is, if I set "Must Have: $0" and "Like to spend:" to $5000, then the chance to success and monte carlo stays at 81%. Why does "Must Have" have no affect here?

I would expect that to be MUCH closer to 99%, since IMHO must:0,like:5000 means "I will spend up to $5000 if I can afford to" which shouldn't be hammering my chance of success.

I'm trying to "balance things out" somewhat in my monte carlo. It's an 81% success rate, but my final "Monte carlo median" value is 7x my starting amount. It feels like I should be able to spend more/guardrail harder, and on average be able to spend more without hurting my overall chance of success. But I can't figure out the settings for that.

I overlooked this. Instructions are to enter gross pay less pre-tax deductions. But post-tax deductions, health and life insurance, Roth 401K are not accounted for when entering income data. Given my post tax deductions are 6x more than pre-tax this is significant. Do these get entered into expenses? How do the pre/post deductions that are entered manually impact social security calaculations?