Boldin Recap: Are You Taking Advantage of All That 2024 Has Unleashed? (Also, Our 2025 Promise)

By 2024, our goal was to empower you to take control of your financial future with confidence, empowering you to make bold choices that align with the life you truly want to live. To achieve this, we focus on delivering a platform that easily adapts to your unique needs, offering powerful yet easy-to-use tools for continuous planning and meaningful progress.

We emphasized not just creating plans, but encouraging planning habits—because even though plans can change, the planning process is important. Throughout the year, we’ve prioritized your most requested features and introduced essential features to improve your understanding of financial wellness.

As we reflect on the past 12 months, here’s a look at the Editor’s milestones that defined 2024. And the best part? There is so much to look forward to in 2025!

Features You Like

In addition to everything we’ve added this year, we wanted to take a moment and celebrate the features you seem to love most about the Boldin Planner:

Comprehensive and Flexible: We still have features to add, but we believe they are – so far – the most complete and comprehensive planning tools available to advisors or direct consumers.

Learning and Finding: Many of you have good programming skills and have built in-depth spreadsheets yourself. But, we hear the Editor is teaching even the oldest and smartest dogs new tricks.

Conditions: What makes Boldin so powerful? He likes to run conditions. Scenarios are a great way to explore any potential future and build confidence that your desired lifestyle can be sustained under most circumstances.

• Status comparisons: What’s better than creating a situation? Comparing that situation with your baseline plan to make informed decisions.
• Forecast comparisons: In addition to comparing scenarios, you can compare your optimistic, pessimistic, and median forecasts to gain insights into your future financial health under various scenarios.

Roth Conversions and Taxes: Tax Insights and Roth Conversion Explorer are two of our most popular features for people nearing retirement.

Financial Life Score and Evaluation on 15+ Different Metrics

Last summer we released what we hope will be the new industry standard for financial health assessment. And, we’re always excited about the Financial Wellness Score and metrics. Depending on your profile, we look at 15+ dimensions of your financial life and give you a clear, actionable summary of how you’re doing.

• You can see your strengths and how to use them.
• Also, find areas where you can find areas for improvement and see what steps you can take to do better

It’s like credit but for all aspects of your overall financial life.

Here are all the metrics tracked (although not all metrics are currently available for all profiles):

Retirement

Income and expenses

Tax

Savings and loans

Home and housing

Life and legacy

Toggle for today and the future

This was one of our most requested features.

Now you can easily switch between seeing your predictions in future dollars or in today’s dollars.

Use the “Forecast” tab (the first icon on the right of the Scenario drop-down) in the top navigation and toggle between the two values.

Customize your withdrawal order

Another feature that has been at the top of your most requested list for some time is the ability to customize the order of accounts for withdrawal. Now you can play with a custom withdrawal order to try to increase your funds. (Also, switch back to traditional editing at any time.)

Pension Withdrawal Report

With the Retirement Withdrawal Report you can drill down on the timing, amounts, and account sources of your withdrawals.

Better Net Worth Tracking

And users can now view month-to-month changes in the current price. See the delta in your Overview. This is the first step in tracking and monitoring your wealth over time.

My Plan Status Summary

We’ve added a My Plan Summary page that allows you to see a summary of your status. Easily review whether each topic is complete and PlannerPlus subscribers can review all important events related to that situation.

Daily Classes

Coach Nancy is now available to help you every day (Monday through Friday) to help you get the most out of your planning.

Advanced Support Options

We make every effort to provide you with answers to your questions as quickly as possible and are improving our use of AI to get you fast and personalized answers, but we will always be there, personally, to make sure you get the answers you need.

Support options include:

• Help center: Since we are not online 24/7, try the Help Center if you get stuck. You will probably get the answer you need. Use the search function to find what you are looking for.
• In-app message: Look for the circle icon in the lower right corner of your Editor screen. Send us your questions. We are here to help.
• Training: We offer 1:1 training to help you make sure your data is answered correctly and walk you through the process of answering your questions using the Editor. Fifty minute programming sessions are $250.
• Money only advice: Want more support? Join a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ expert from Boldin Advisors to identify and achieve your goals.

Assignments

We added a qualified dividend yield feature to after-tax accounts. This improves the tax accuracy of the program’s predictions.

Communication and Ongoing Efforts to Improve Account Linking

Boldin connects your accounts to all the top financial data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, and MX) to give you the best chance to connect all your accounts and keep them in sync.

This is a challenging area for the entire financial services industry. There are significant differences in how financial institutions share data, including frequent changes in access protocols, security measures, and API connections. Additionally, data synchronization can be disrupted by factors such as multiple authentication requirements, server outages, or delays in aggregator updates, resulting in inconsistent or out-of-date information for users.

That being said, we are always committed to doing better.

The Most Accurate Ways to Match Your Paycheck Deductions and Employer Contributions to Savings

Retirement funds are the foundation of a secure future. Also, employers offer many different benefits to grateful employees. This year Boldin has enabled check donations and payroll deductions.

Read more…

Apply for a Roth Conversion Plan

Now you can automatically apply your Roth Conversion Explorer suggestions to your practice.

This highly anticipated update makes it easy to add suggested changes and see the impact on your Chances of Retirement Success with other valuable analytics.

IRMAA Analysis and Enhancements

We added IRMAA ratings to many charts and released the IRMAA details page.

Read more about IRMAA.

Enabling Additional Account Types, Including Inherited IRAs

We have added 403b, 457b, Roth 401k, Roth 403b, and Roth 457b accounts. This update enables more accurate tax predictions and contribution limits. For example, the Planner now allows an annual combined contribution limit for 401k or 403b and 457b accounts.

Check to make sure you have selected the correct account type for your assets.

Inherited IRAs

Inherited IRAs and Different Types of Beneficiaries. This feature enables users to easily account for Inherited IRAs including required distributions and any related income tax liability. Improvements support ease of use, opportunity discovery, and more accurate financial planning.

We examine the distribution rules you should follow and model an automatic withdrawal strategy.

Gender Options

We’ve added two more options to Gender: Prefer No Response and No Bib or No Gender

Fixes and bugs

We are always on the lookout for typos, fixes and bugs and work hard to fix these in a timely manner.

Cash balance pension

If your employer offers you a cash balance pension, you can now model this in the Editor.

Required Distribution Report

This will allow users to more accurately understand Required Distributions from retirement accounts and Inherited IRAs.

Use the report to understand IRS rules and avoid penalties. The information will also enable better decisions about other distribution strategies.

Annual State, Federal, and Other Automatic Data Updates

We keep our model up to date.

• On Jan. 1, 2025 we also revised federal tax rates, Medicare rates, and Social Security income limits.
• Country updates will be done in batches in the first few months of the year.
• Last year we also revised our default on long-term care costs as they had increased significantly.

Have your guesses changed with the latest update?

Industry Awards and Honors

In 2024 we received many prestigious industry awards and were covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, MarketWatch, and more. We are proud of what we are building and appreciate your support and suggestions on how we can continue to improve.

What’s Coming in 2025?!

We are proud of our commitment to constantly evolving the Editor and all of our content and services so you can live the life you want. In addition to the continued development of Roth conversions and other modeling tools, we aim to make Planner easier to use and help you keep your plans up-to-date and compatible.

Stay tuned for an exciting release in 2025 for what the future holds no matter what.