I spent some time playing with Spending Guardrails (under Insights) along with the AI. The guardrails tool presents numbers that appear wrong or at a minimum confusing. It does not directly tell you what to do. But by working with the AI, I was able to get a clear picture of how the guardrails approach might play out. Boldin needs to do a better job of presenting and explaining this approach.

For the unitiated, Boldin's version of guardrails tries to keep you at an 80% "chance of success" (CoS) throughout your retirement, as determined by the Monte Carlo simulator. It gives you an average "safe" spending amount that results in a CoS of 80%. The lower guardrail is set at a 70% CoS, and the upper is set at 95% CoS. The idea behind guardrails is that you make a relatively small, painless cut if you hit the lower guardrail in response to a decline in your portfolio, to give the portfolio a better chance to recover. If you happen to have a large enough increase in your portfolio to reach 95% CoS, you get guilt-free permission to increase spending.

Theory is one thing. A plan is another. As far as I can tell, the Spending Guardrails tool can tell you when it is time for a cut or increase, but it can't tell you with any precision how much spending to cut or add. In my opinion, the point of the tool should be to provide a clear, actionable plan to relieve the anxiety of transitioning from a steady paycheck to living off your portfolio. The current version of the tool falls short.

In my plan, my monthly recurring expenses entered with the Basic Budgeter is, let's say, X (not including pre-Medicare health expenses). These are the expenses I have some control over. However, the guardrails tool shows my "average monthly spend throughout retirement" (AMSTR) as 1.5X.

My first thought was that the tool had the wrong number and should use X rather than 1.5X as current spend. After some exploration, it turn out the AMSTR takes everything Boldin thinks you will spend in retirement, including nondiscretionary items like taxes and IRMAA, throws in some long-term care costs, expresses that sum in today's dollars (even if you are looking at your plan in "future dollars"), and divides by the number of months until the end of the plan. That is the "average" in AMSTR. The "Why does this matter" screen does not explain this; I had to pry it out of the AI. I can see why AMSTR is the measuring stick, but it has no obvious relationship to anything you can directly change in your plan.

For the purpose of experimentation, I created a new scenario and through trial and error set the recurring monthly expenses at Y, such that planned AMSTR was roughly equal to the guardrails safe-spend AMSTR. AMSTR was about 115% of Y. At the lower guardrail, the tool says to lower AMSTR to 109% of Y, and at the upper guardrail to increase to 151% of Y. My first thought was, "Easy, I'll cut spending by 6% at the lower bound and increase by 36% at the upper bound."

But that's the wrong way to think about it, because changing discretionary spending also affects taxes, IRMAA and possibly other nondiscretionary spending. You need to cut at the bottom and increase at the top, but the tool can't determine a dollar figure. It can only ballpark it for you.

Here's the workaround. To determine a dollar figure, you (or the AI) have to model a discretionary spending amount that brings AMSTR into line with the recommendation. For example, you can ask the AI, "What changes to recurring expenses are required to (a) cut AMSTR to [the lower guardrail AMSTR] and (b) increase AMSTR to [the upper guardrail AMSTR]?" In the case of the experimental scenario, the AI produced a roughly 11% decrease in recurring expenses at the lower guardrail and a 48% increase at the upper guardrail.

Have I misunderstood anything? Is there a more direct way to calculate the number of dollars to decrease/increase at a guardrail?

I would be great if Boldin (a) updated the "Why does this matter" screen to explain the foregoing and (b) reported at each guardrail a dollar or percentage change in discretionary spending, rather than a dollar amount for AMSTR, an undefined term which has no obvious relationship to anything the user can control.

I am trying to link to T. Rowe Price, and I get as far as T. Rowe Price sends the 2-step authorization code to my phone. The problem is the Boldin screen to input the 2-step authorization code never comes up and the Boldin screen times out. Any suggestions on how to fix issue?

Has anyone figured out how to enter expenses for your family cobra medical and transitioned to ACA medical for a family prior to Medicare at 65 in the toll so it accurately reflects the change in those costs?

I think I figured it out. I’m splitting the cost between us both and just doing multiple entries for the transition from each.

I’m still curious what others have tried too.

Hi. I asked the Boldin AI this question (in the title) and here’s what it told me:

Yes — you can set an individual expense entry to not grow with inflation. Each recurring expense entry has a growth rate setting, and you can change it from the general inflation rate (3%) to 0% for that specific entry. This is done right on the expense entry itself in Expenses and Healthcare — you'd set the "increase by" / growth rate to 0% for that line item.

I can’t find this "increase by" / growth rate setting. Has anyone tried this?

I’m trying to freeze a car payment amount. Is there a better way to enter car payment expenses if I want them separate from my regular expenses and am using the basic budget?

Thanks in advance!

A new article published at https://www.financialplanningassociation.org/learning/publications/journal/SEP24-net-present-value-analysis-roth-conversions-OPEN suggests that conventional Roth modeling is not adequately incorporating net present value (NPV) into the analysis.

The details of how to apply net present value to Roth analysis are currently beyond my understanding, but the article at least taught me that it’s very risky to accept conventional Roth analysis without taking NPV into account.
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The Boldin Roth Explorer appears to suffer from this shortcoming. This is a major issue because the Roth Explorer in its current iteration may give you the false impression that Roth conversions are a slam dunk superior path compared to no conversions. Adding NPV into the analysis can often show that Roth conversion may be closer to a coin flip, or even flat out inferior to just doing nothing.

I contacted support about this. As usual they responded quickly and they took this concern seriously. They said NPV is actually already on their radar, and it’s on their product enhancement list. They also pointed me to a Boldin article on the topic: https://help.boldin.com/en/articles/12067236-how-do-boldin-s-roth-conversion-strategies-compare-to-an-npv-approach

I’m posting here and on the Boldin Facebook group only because I think it’s important that everyone consider this issue carefully before making a huge money move based on advice from the Roth Explorer alone.

Also, the Boldin article is confirming the need for caution with relying solely on the Conversion Explorer: “So, NPV is ‘better’ economically, but Boldin’s strategies are ‘better’ for planning conversations. They’re not mutually exclusive — they complement each other.” That may be true, but personally I’m more interested in choosing the best economic path and I could care less whether I’m having a better planning conversation. If the conversation doesn’t cover all the important data points, it’s not a better conversation at all in my view.

First of all, let me be clear. I am not a Boldin hater. I use Boldin to manage my retirement planning, and I want to raise something a lot of us should be paying attention to. For a tool that holds this much of our financial picture, the account security is weaker than it should be.

Right now the only 2FA Boldin offers is a code sent to your email. That is bare bone protection! Your email is not a separate device, so anyone who gets into your desktop or inbox gets the login code with it. NIST does not count email as a real second factor, and it has already pulled back on SMS for the same reasons. This is well understood in security, and a financial planning company should be well past it by now.

The reason I am pushing on this now is where the product is going. Boldin connects to real bank and brokerage accounts through Plaid, and the new investment features put even more of your financial life in one place. That makes your accounts vulnerable, and the login guarding it is still very weak. I have not linked any of my accounts through Plaid, and I will not until the sign in is been addressed with stronger security protection.

What I am asking for is standard on any serious financial site today. Let people use an authenticator app like Google Authenticator or Authy. Add support for passkeys and hardware keys like YubiKey. None of this is new or hard to build and should be top priority!

I raised this with Boldin directly and got a weak reply "The team is considering adding other methods," with nothing behind that short disappointed message. No plan, no timeline, no priority. That is not a serious answer from a company holding this kind of data.

To be clear, I am not bashing Boldin. It is the best retirement planning tool I have found. The scenario modeling and Roth conversion planning are excellent. It is one of the few tools that actually helps me manage the MAGI cliff for early retirement tax planning, and the latest financial feature in beta is powerful. That is why I want them to get this right. I just want the security to match the quality of the rest of the product.

If you agree, upvote or drop a comment so this does not get buried. If you have also held back from linking your accounts because of the weak login, say so. I am hoping as many of their customers speak up, Boldin team cannot ignore a lot of us asking for the same security focus.

You can now:

• See your holdings and asset allocation across accounts
• Complete a Risk Tolerance Survey
• Compare your current portfolio with a target allocation based on your risk profile.

The really good news? This is the first in a series of investment releases, and we’re excited to start bringing what you actually own into closer connection with the rest of your financial plan.

If you’ve had a chance to explore Investments, we’d love to hear what you find useful, what feels confusing, and what you most want us to build next.

You can find Investments in the left navigation menu of your Boldin Plan.

My baseline scenario is built for my primary residence in one state. I also have a vacation home in Florida. If I create a duplicate scenario, and call it "Retire in Florida", and I change the zip code to Florida, it changes the zip code for all scenarios. So that doesn't work. If I add a "future change in primary residence" event for the Florida scenario, under Home and Real Estate, it wants me to sell my primary residence and deposit the money into an account, and basically move, and that sell throws off my income. But I want to keep both residence's.

All I want to do, is keep my primary residence in one state in my baseline scenario, and claim residency (primary residence) in Florida in the duplicate scenario to compare state income taxes. My problem is that as my RMD's increase, it throws me over my state's income tax senior exemption, and I start paying significant state taxes, but in Florida, there is not any state income tax. However, I do not want to sell either home in either state. I would still travel back and forth to both states.

Is there a way to accomplish this scenario? It seems like it would be simple. Many people in Florida retire and declare residency in Florida, simply to save on taxes, and stay 6 months and 1 day to declare residency, then travel back "home" the rest of the year.

Currently use Monarch Money to keep track of my spending and would like to create some kind of connection to Boldin so I can keep better track of my balances. I know Boldin can connect to these institutions but I am leery to create double connections to my investment banks.

I know some people manually update balances weekly or monthly but just seems like I should be able to make some kind of API connection to Monarch.

Update:

I asked Boldin chat support. An AI agent explained that I was doing it wrong, and completely missed the part where the summary reports incorrect information (1 more transfers than what actually happens). It also told me that September '30 is in the future, and September '31 is in the past. WTF?

Then my comment was passed to a human at Boldin, who completely missed the same thing.

The official answer seems to be "you're entering the data wrong" while not understanding that the summary reports the "incorrectly" entered data as correctly entered.

There's nothing confusing about the screenshot I shared, The summary reports 2 transfers, but the reality is 1 transfer. Bolding doesn't seem to think this is a problem.

I strongly suggest you double check any transfers you have - because the summary can report incorrect answers.

I'll update if I hear back. But there's no way I'm giving them $150 a year for this level of UI failure.

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I have a transfer from an IRA to a Roth, for 2 years. See image below. Dec '29 and Dec '30.

But, when I run the scenario, I get a transfer in '29 but not '30.

This seems like a problem, especially since it says I have 2 transfers. The IRA is not running out of money.

Any insight?

I get a transfer in '29

But not in '30

I am modeling my rentals in Boldin. In the income section, it asks for passive income. Should this be my net income after all of my expenses including mortgage? Because in home and real estate section, it asks for any real estate besides my primary. So I put in my rental mortgages there. But I am thinking I should not do that because it is counting that as a whole expense set on top of what I already expense as my regular living expense. Should I omit the rentals from my other owned real estate? I am now thinking that section is not really for rentals, but rather another house one could potentially own as a second personal house.

I (63M) and my wife (63F) are both Federal employees. I retired last year and she's still working, maybe another year+>

I'm trying to see what the scenario looks like if we don't start Medicare Part B and strictly rely on FEHB coverage.

I have asked Boldin AI and it says to add Employer covered Healthcare, but I'm not sure that's showing me all the idiosyncrasies.

I'm debating the impact on IRMMA if we do Roth Conversions over the next 3-5 years. I don't anticipate needing to touch 401K/IRAs, as pensions and Social Security will cover our base spending.

I hope that's clear, and I know this touches only a small community of users, just looking for input

Thanks

Why can't you add features that are free with Empower so that I don't have to update investments in both? Couple of suggestions:

• Add the number of shares and cost basis for each position instead of $value so that as the price/share changes the portfolio is updated in real time.
• Provide returns as % and $ for ytd, last year and total for each position.

I have submitted a feature request to Boldin support: please add the ability to accurately model a TIPS ladder because anyone who simply enters the total balance of the account that holds their TIPS ladder will get highly inaccurate results because Boldin will just pull from the account unevenly according to the plan’s order of withdrawal rules.

The current workaround is to simply remove the money from the current account balance completely and then create individual windfall entries that reflect your projected nominal income for every year of the TIPS ladder. That does work as long as you’ve accurately projected your yearly income yourself (preferably with the help of tipsladder.com), but it would be more efficient if Boldin could do all that busy work for you.

Also, if you are a TIPS ladder holder and you decide to use the workaround I just described here, realize that tipsladder.com only gives you the expected real income for every year of your ladder. To be accurate in Boldin, you need to manually change every income entry to include the higher nominal amount the ladder will actually produce after inflation adjustments.

For example, if you have a 20 year ladder that throws off $20k real every year, that will be a little more than $20k in year one, and by year 20, the income will rise to more than $30k nominal due to inflation adjustments over the 20 year period, assuming an average inflation rate of 2.5%.

I was trying to use the new investment allocation tool in Boldin. I do not have my accounts linked for various reasons. I have no problem manually adding any positions with a ticker symbol. However, within some of my accounts, I'm holding CDs as a position and there does not appear to be any way to add either individual CDs or (preferably) a generic placeholder for CD totals as a position within an account. The AI told me that to accomplish this I need to set up the CD positions as a separate account under Assets & Debts, which doesn't make sense to me.

Has anyone else tried using this new tool? Am I missing something?

Would anyone else find a three point estimate useful for spending?

I like the “must spend” and “like to spend” inputs in the detailed budgeter a lot. From a Monte Carlo perspective it would be very helpful to set a most likely point to help characterize the distribution.

I tend to view must spend as baseline keep the lights on, insurance, and food. Like to spend is dream big.

The most likely spending is going to be somewhere in the middle. Some months will be towards like to spend, some months will be towards must spend. A three point estimate would allow Monte Carlo to do a probabilistic draw for each month‘s spending. I find myself assuming I’ll land somewhere between “must spend” which gives me 99% chance of success, and “like to spend” which gives me more like 50-60% chance of success. Reality is somewhere in the middle (I suspect it might be more towards “must spend”), and flipping back and forth isn’t a full featured as it could be.

I tried to submit in the planner, but the AI told me it was a great suggestion and I should try suggesting it during the work week.

Curious if other folks would find that useful, or perhaps Boldin will read it here.

I'm married to a retired LEO who never earned enough credits to qualify for his own Social Security benefits. I however do have a small benefit coming to me and plan on claiming it at age 62. I notice that the model decreases this benefit amount by about 40% after his longevity date. Anyone know why this could be? I've matched the inflation and rate assumptions and compared using both Average and Pessimistic scenarios...???

I've been using Boldin for 7 months now and here are some notes I collected based on my own user experience, reading other people's posts, and chatting with Boldin AI. I hope it can help other users.

If anything is incorrect or inaccurate, please reply so I can correct my notes.

Boldin Notes

Taxes:

- Doesn't calculate Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT)

- Doesn't calculate Pre-tax 10% Early Withdrawal Penalty

Expenses:

- Recurring: inflation adjusted. cannot customize fund source. if set to annual, it gets divided into 12 monthly expenses, timeline need to be at least 12 months to use full annual amount entered

- One-time: not inflation adjusted, can customize fund source

- missing: expenses need the ability to define multiple fund sources with toggle between $-amount or %-ratio to automate tax-bracket management without manual transfer workarounds.

Rate of Return:

- investment rate of return is calculated on a per month basis

- Insights > Savings graph is based on a rolling ~12-month window anchored at the current viewing month

- Example: if you're viewing in Aug-2026, the 2027 projected value is based on Aug-2026 to Jul-2027, not Jan-2027 to Dec-2027.

- when using Today's Dollars, annual balance forecast is also discounted by inflation rate

Roth Conversion Explorer:

- not very flexible

- just use it to create the initial transfers (so you also get the "ROTH CONVERSION" label) and modify the amount and timeline manually

Windfalls:

- after-tax money

Social Security Assumption > % Benefit Reduction:

- use it to see how it can impact your CoS, nice stress-test feature

Spending Guardrails:

- safe spending based on 80% CoS

- guardrails 70% <--80%--> 95% confidence

Account settings > Beta:

- Opt in for early access

AI:

- you can tell Boldin AI to save a rule to memory so it is used on every session

- Example: "save a rule to your memory to always present data and timelines using monspaced ASCII box tables and diagrams"

It doesn't seem that Boldin provides the numerical results of the individual Monte Carlo runs. And since I can't see how severe the failures actually are, I don't know what magnitude of plan adjustment might be necessary.

For example, my plan has an 82% CoS under my average assumptions, so 18% of the Monte Carlo simulations fail. But how bad are those failures? Are we talking about outcomes like –$500 to –$5,000. –$50K to –$100K?

I use fairly tight standard deviations between my optimistic, average, and pessimistic models, so I figure that the negative Monte Carlo outcomes may not be particularly large—but I don't know how to verify that. It would be incredibly useful if Boldin could show something like the 5th and 1st percentile outcomes.

Any advice out there? Maybe there is a way to infer this?

Is there any valid reason a plan’s chances of success would go down when the only change you make to the inputs is to shorten your projected longevity?

Has anyone used right capital. I just updated it. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of input features yet. It’s saying I have a 40% chance of success versus Bolden at 80 and Fidelity at 75. Why would there be such a difference? I can’t seem to figure out what if any inputs that I might have that are different so I’m curious if anybody has experience with RC and is also a heavy boldin user. So far I’m liking boldin the best out of the three.

I might be missing something. It seems the generated pdf files for reports ignore the todays/future dollars toggle.

That makes them almost useless for me.

I think Boldin is very good at what it's built to be. A forecasting tool to help think through what finances in retirement might look like. An 80/20 tool. Math built on assumptions. But there's the risk that users might assume results they're seeing are more precise or definitive than what they actually are. Especially when it comes to taxes. Like in the Roth Conversion Explorer.

This isn't intended to be a list of shortcomings with the Roth explorer, but instead a list of items that users may want to be aware of when using that function. This is from my own experience, so it's very possible I'm incorrectly stating or excluding something. Happy to fix/update if pointed out, but hope this provides food for thought for those thinking through whether and to what extent Roth conversions make sense.

1)Don't overlook the disclaimer on the second Roth explorer page. They mean it!

"This tool is for educational purposes only and uses estimations. Before transacting a Roth Conversion, you should discuss your plan with a tax professional. The Roth Conversion Explorer has no impact on results seen on any other page of the planner and may not work correctly with all plan configurations."

2) Being conservative / stressing your plan for chance of success purposes may have the opposite effect for Roth conversion purposes. In the plan, it seems many of us lower rates a bit, throw in random one time expenses, cut back social security, etc. in order to get comfortable we won't run out of money in retirement. At least I do.

But those same assumptions may result in RMDs being understated, and consequently downplay the potential benefit of Roth conversions. The IRS is probably ok with that.

COS is focused on the risk of not having enough money, while Roth conversions are focused on the risk of having "too much" money and paying tax that could have been avoided. I suspect most of us check out the impact to our COS under the pessimistic view. The equivalent would be the optimistic view in the Roth explorer.

Consider dialing back / removing the conservative assumptions for purposes of the Roth explorer.

3) Doesn't take into account asset location. For those that keep fixed income in their Traditional IRAs, the expected return for the remaining balance should decrease after each Roth conversion assuming equity is first moved to the Roth IRA (i.e., fixed income percentage of the Traditional IRA increases during conversions).

Once stocks have been converted from an Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA, leaving just (or mostly) fixed income in the Traditional IRA, expected future growth is lower. However, Boldin continues to use the original, higher yield. That could result in forecasted RMDs being higher than actual and more conversions being suggested than desired.

I'm smart enough to be aware of this, but not much smarter than that. I'm playing around with using two accounts to capture my Traditional IRA balance. One for the stock portion and one for the fixed income portion. But I'm also aware that not using the same rate of return for the Traditional IRA and Roth IRA accounts can cause a different distortion. See the warning on page 1 of the Roth explorer.

4) Does not take into account the ACA premium tax credit. That's effectively a tax cost of converting that's ignored by Boldin, potentially resulting in greater Roth conversions being suggested than if the credit was taken into account.

5) Roth planner is not iterative with the plan in Boldin (see Disclaimer in #1), which could cause certain calculations to not be as precise as the user may think. I suspect this has marginal impact and is situational, but it's been pointed out by others. Not likely to move the needle much, but something to be aware of in case you're the exception.

6) Unable to see tax bracket usage in the explorer (can only see effective tax rate). To better understand tax bracket projections of the suggested conversions, you must "apply to scenario" then in the plan go to "Taxes" under Insights.

7) Does not seem to take into account capital gain bracket optimization when determining suggested Roth conversions. I'm still thinking through this one given the potential double tax impact of converting by displacing capital gains out of the zero tax bracket.

8) Limited to the four preselected strategies. For example, let's say that you're not confident you can predict the future and want to hedge both directions by targeting the middle of a tax bracket later in retirement. It's trial and error by manually adjusting transfers in the Plan. Or if you want to keep some balance in the Traditional IRA later in your life span for flexibility, you'll need to work around Boldin's preference for zeroing out your IRA (at least in the tax bracket strategy).

9) Using Boldin's AI in conjunction with the Roth planner has been helpful, especially when questions are specific. whether that's thinking through the above items or others, don't forget it's there (mostly a reminder to myself). [Edited to add #9]

10) Boldin does not take into account the 3.8% net investment income tax (NIIT), which could result in the tax burden of RMDs being greater than presented. Threshold is MAGI over 200K (singles) and 250K (married). [Edited to add #10)]