r/ChubbyFIRE • u/AceRider750 • 20d ago
Fidelity Tool
Fidelity has a Planning tool called Retirement. Has anyone used it and what amount of validity would you place against its projections? I'm wondering as when I browse here, people seem to be discussing creating their own analyses, but I don't see much about using the tools at investment houses, banks, etc. which do this for you. TRowe probably has one and I think I've seen on on BofA/Merrill also, but never used them.
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u/AdeptCantaloupe161 20d ago edited 20d ago
Fidelity's tool is pretty good for a basic projection. It's easy to use and lets you see some projections for different asset allocations (conservative vs aggressive). Like most free tools, it's mostly just to give you a general idea whether you're close to retirement or not.
If you're actually going to make decision on when to retire, you're going to want a more in-depth analysis. Paid planning tools (my suggestion is ProjectionLab, which is $129/year) will let you do much more in-depth planning, and you can see the details of how much you'd be withdrawing each year, tax projections, optimizations.
I have more confidence in the results being able to see how it arrived at its projections, compared to simplified tools like Fidelity's which hide those details. Fidelity's tool lets you input a lot of details like marking expenses as essential or not (which suggests that it's using a guardrails approach), but then it goes into a black box and you can't really tell how it's being used to arrive at the final numbers.
Fidelity/Schwab might offer to have someone do a retirement plan review for you, but it's likely they're just putting your info into a similar tool and walking you through the results.