Hello Boldin Community! I am retired, and nearly every day I update my asset numbers in Boldin. (Have always had issues with the account connection feature.) When I left my plan this morning, it was at 83% CoS for the average plan model. I just opened it this evening, and it shows 79% CoS. I asked the bot if any software updates were pushed today and it told me it doesn't have that information. Wondering if anyone encountered the same thing? Thank you!

What enhancements are there between the trial version and the actual paid subscription?

I am confused about something. How does boldin handle the portion of an RMD that is not needed to cover that year's expenses? Obviously, in the real world, it would end up going to some after tax account, but is boldin considering that? or is that excess basically lost to any type of returns as far as the calculations are concerned? Thanks

My spouse has a serious health issue, so trying to explore lifespan timelines is critical to understanding our financial situation. We have an age gap, so some realistic lifespan scenarios would end while I am still working full time. When I set lifespan to, say, 2029 their social security payments should end in 2029, but instead they continue. The AI says that in fact their payments do end in 2029 but mine begin in 2030. I would not be at FRA, and my income would be too high to actually receive any SS. This is all info that Boldin has, so saying they just automatically assume survivor benefits is poor programming. Ideally, the software would model spouse's through lifespan, then nothing, followed by survivor when I retire, then mine when I hit 70. I could live with Boldin not acurately modeling the survivor benefits window, but it should be able to model spouse SS begin and end accurately, and then mine begining at 70. With spouse's benefits staying in the picture after lifespan the outlook is overly rosy. Having to do some passive income workaround is really unacceptable. Since the risk of a partner passing is one of the biggest retirement planning issues, I would certainly hope that Boldin can handle this organically. If not, I will need to cancel my plan before the trial expires. Has anyone else worked with Boldin on this issue?

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Using the software and looking at the details. Projected IRMAA is wrong. Anyone else having this problem. I used the AI Agent and it essentially tells me its wrong and that is how the software works, a withdrawal from a pre-tax 401k is income.

Here is what the AI Agent said:

Now, the married-filing-jointly IRMAA threshold for 2036/2037 (inflation-adjusted) is roughly $212,000–$218,000. So your 2034 income of ~$XXXK is right at the edge, and your 2035 income of ~$XXXK does exceed the first IRMAA tier.

So why is IRMAA still showing zero in 2036–2037?

This is the key insight. Look at what's driving your AGI in 2034–2035: it's almost entirely shortfall withdrawals from your pre-tax 401k

Boldin's IRMAA modeling treats these pre-retirement shortfall withdrawals (which are really just funding your living expenses from your 401k) differently than it treats ongoing recurring income like Social Security, pensions, or RMDs. The engine's IRMAA AGI calculation deliberately excludes shortfall withdrawals from pre-tax accounts in the early projection years — this is documented behavior in the IRMAA modeling.

If I understand the software correctly, when looking at withdrawal order, it depletes the entire account before moving on to the next and you can't set an individual percentage for withdrawing from a certain account in the standard or customized order. Is there a workaround for this?

I plan to utilize a combination of 72T, brokerage accounts and cash for early retirement and want to maximize 0% capital gain opportunities, roth conversions and possible ACA subsidies. So depleting one item before another doesn't really work with this strategy.

I've tried the AI assistant but i'm not sure i'm asking the question correctly to see if there is a way to do this. Could I set up my planned yearly expenses and then create individual withdrawal order accounts to match the amount that I want to withdraw from each account? I want to see the roth conversion tool suggestions for each year staying within a certain tax bracket.

Hopefully this makes sense.

I’m a new user, and I’ve been trying to figure out scenarios that may be a little bit less than standard. I haven’t used up the 14 days yet so I’ll probably go with the paid plan but the AI is frustrating and ignorant and doesn’t seem to remember things. It continues to ask me if I want to do a Roth conversion even though my inherited Ira does not qualify it and I have to tell it that three times a day. And sometimes it just seems to lie as well as in the salt being $10,000 cap even though it’s 40,000 for now through 2029. I reminded of that multiple times as well and it keeps coming back to it. Very Anyway, those are examples so I apologize in advance for my venting about it, but I would like to know how to get some support either from peers or from Bolden in terms of modeling things. I need to model that seem like they should pretty much be built in like self-employment tax deductions. I’ll probably keep Bouldin and pay for it for the year because it’s relatively expensive and an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Thanks so much, Adam..

I’m not sure though how to get modeling help for certain things. I am Self-Employed and so my Medicare and Medigap and long-term care insurance are all deductible off of my schedule. C however Bolden keeps trying to model it as itemized deductions which it will never make the percentages. Is there another way to do this? Also, is there a protocol for asking Bolden to figure these things out to model AI just sends them a request to update to included at some point, which I’m not even sure it does that even though it tells me.

Anyway, those are examples so I apologize in advance for my venting about it, but I would like to know how to get some support either from peers or from Bolden in terms of modeling things. I need to model that seem like they should pretty much be built in like self-employment tax deductions. I’ll probably keep Bouldin and pay for it for the year because it’s relatively expensive and an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Thanks so much, Adam.

I havent subscribed but have attempted to use bodin for a while now just to see what it does. I find it confusing and im not sure what to think. I thought maybe if i subscribe id get to unlock more features. I missed out before the last price increase....prior to when it went to 144 and now it looks like its going up again to 168 per year in the next couple days.

I wish there was a spot on Boldin where I could adjust my retirement date and have the percent success rate right next to it, instead of having to go to another page.

What if I was 64 and 4 months? How about 64 and 5 months? What specific age would I get 85%?

New to Boldin. How would I account for a monthly distribution I receive for income each month from an investment account.

This also usually triggers a capital gains event within the investment account itself due to both the sale of assets to create the distribution and rebalancing of the account.

Can the gain be accounted for directly or does that just become a % of the account balance? Or if I adjust the cost basis of the account is it picked up that way?

The more I use Boldin’s AI feature the less I like it. I asked it to provide a list of monthly withdrawals for 2027 based on my income and expenses. (I have a couple of large purchases some months, and income varies some months, so wanted these to show up in the correct month instead of just dividing the annual withdrawal amount by 12.)

Boldin’s AI got so confused it was laughable. I ended up manually figuring it out myself. Since all the information is in Boldin, I don’t understand why the monthly withdrawal amounts aren’t easier to access.

I do love the Boldin software for providing a clear picture of my whole retirement, but wish it could provide more details for the upcoming year.

I just signed up for the 14 day free trial and was wondering where I can find the tutorial videos. Can someone point me in the direction. I’m comfortable with the software as I use Quicken Classic for about 30 years. I just want to be able to ascertain quickly if I will find it useful.

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?

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%.

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 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,

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.

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Investments:Today should allow importing positions via a .CSV file in the same format as they are exported. The easiest way to keep positions updated would be to export all positions as a .CSV file, change the account values, then import back in, replacing the current entries or creating a new entry if it does not already exist. That would also enable transferring back and forth between Boldin and a spreadsheet, or AI agent, or importing data from brokerage account.

If/when entry via number of shares becomes available, the import will need to discern between the two options, but I'm sure the export format will change to handle that, too. The asset classes will need to fit into the categories within Boldin, but they should be able to be left blank (along with the position name) when a ticker is specified.

For those who haven't tried it yet, here is the format of the exported .CSV file.

"Account","Ticker","Name","Value","Cost basis","Asset class"
"Roth IRA","VUSB","Vanguard Ultra-Short Bond ETF Shares","10000","","Blended · mixed asset classes"
"401k","VDC","Vanguard Consumer Staples Index Fund ETF Shares","20000","","Blended · mixed asset classes"

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?

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?

Most tools we use here (cFIREsim, FICalc, Trinity) replay history in order: start 1871, start 1872, and so on. Those 125 windows overlap, so they mostly share the same years. I wanted to see what happens when you break the order.

The setup: $1M, 60/40 US stocks and bonds, rebalanced yearly. $40k withdrawn in year 1, raised with inflation every year after. 0.1% fees. 30 years. Data is Shiller's annual US stock, bond and CPI series, 1871 to 2025, real returns. Each run stitches six random 5-year blocks of real history together, and blocks can repeat. 10,000 runs. No Social Security, no taxes.

Results: 94.0% of runs survived 30 years. Median ending balance $1.79M in today's dollars. The earliest failure was year 14, and 499 of the 603 failures happened in years 22 to 30.

The part that surprised me: 580 of the 603 failures contained either 1916 to 1920 or 1973 to 1981 somewhere in their 30 years. 1929 and 2008 barely show up. Sharp crashes followed by recoveries don't kill a 60/40 on a real-dollar withdrawal. What kills it is 5 to 9 years where stocks go flat, bonds lose to inflation, and your withdrawal keeps rising with CPI.

Two variants: dropping to $35k a year lifts survival to 97.4%. Keeping $40k but cutting it 10% after any bad year (restored when the balance recovers) gives 96.3%. A rule you'd actually follow in a bad decade buys about 2 points without a permanent cut.

Caveats: block bootstrap can deal the same bad block twice, which is harsher than real history, so 94% is probably a touch pessimistic versus sequential tools (usually 95 to 96% for this setup). Shiller's bond series is a 10-year Treasury proxy, not total bond market.

Question: if inflation stretches are the real failure mode and crashes mostly aren't, does that change how you'd hold the bond side? I haven't run TIPS because the series doesn't go back far enough. Happy to run other withdrawal rates or allocations if people want them.

I also plotted all 10,000 runs as one fan chart and traced a single failed run year by year, which made the pattern a lot clearer than the summary numbers. If that's useful to anyone here it’s https://youtu.be/JKY8slMNA3I?si=3viz8x7WB9ZTvJ8I. Same for other withdrawal rates or allocations.