What is the one thing you can do today to ensure better financial decision making, habits, and outcomes? You can build and maintain a holistic financial plan. And one way to do that step-by-step is using the NewRetirement Planner.
It’s been over 1.5 years since I did my first review of their platform. So I reached out to their team to get some updates on their growth and new features, highlighted below. They’ve made some notable enhancements that are worth checking out. NewRetirement is one of the best retirement planners today.
What does their software do exactly? With the NewRetirement Planner, you get to take financial wellness into your own hands. Their powerful tool enables you to track all of your accounts (savings, stocks, real estate investments, crypto, and more) in one place. But, the system goes way beyond savings and investments.
You can use their technology to keep track of and strategize your time, income, taxes, debt, goals, insurance, benefits, and more. The tool can also help you find your path to the future you want. It’s up to you to follow (or break) every rule in the book as appropriate to your values and priorities.
What’s New With The NewRetirement Planner?
Below you’ll find 11 recent enhancements and new features to the NewRetirement Planner. It’s a powerful tool for people who want to optimize every dollar and live life on their own terms.
1) Run What if Scenarios With NewRetirement
NewRetirement is constantly updating their model and adding functionality to enable you to run additional “what if” scenarios. You can run any scenario that is meaningful to you:
- Save in a Roth or traditional account?
- Retire at 35, 45, 65?
- Increase savings or pay down debt?
- Invest in an apartment building or single family home?
- Take Social Security later than earlier?
Instantly see the impact of financial decisions on your net worth, cash flow, retirement age and more.
These enhancements also make your plan more accurate and reliable.
2) Model Your Castle and Kingdom
Whether you want to model just your castle (your home) or you’re an individual looking to build an entire kingdom (investment property), NewRetirement will project your future finances for any possible real estate investment. This is powerful since building a real estate empire (or village) is a good path to financial success.
You can monitor your mortgage and project your pay off date for your residence. You can also see what happens with cash out refinancing, accelerated mortgage payments, downsizing and more.
But, that is not all. You can also model your current or projected investment properties. Haven’t bought anything yet? Get motivated by running a scenario to assess what impact it will have on your actual financial situation (now and into the future).
3) Activate Your Passive Income With The NewRetirement Planner
The NewRetirement Planner has a unique feature that enables you to model and project passive income streams. You can set custom time periods (start and stop ranges) for each stream as well as growth rate.
As someone who has been building passive income since 1999, this NewRetirement feature is my favorite. You can’t achieve financial freedom if you don’t have enough passive income. Therefore, the better you can model out your passive income, the stronger your chance of achieving your goals.
4) Monitor Key Metrics: What’s Your Chance of Success?
While there are infinite paths to getting to a comfortable retirement, funding your life through your longevity is the ultimate financial goal.
And, the NewRetirement Planner enables you to easily track this metric. It’s called your “Chance of Success” score. (Improvements have been made to the way it calculates the range of possible outcomes that exist within your plan to make it more accurate. Log in to see if your “Chance of Success” has changed.)
Ideally, you want your “Chance of Success” percentage to be as high as possible. Once you’re at the 95% mark or higher, that’s when you will start feeling more at ease.
5) Plan Your Retirement Down To The Month, Not Year
NewRetirement may be the only planning tool that allows you to plan using months. This is a big deal if you want accurate projections. Think about it, if you retire in June, your annual work income is cut in half for the year. Paying off a debt? You need the payments down to the month to make your projections on target.
All dates (work income, expenses, and more) in the NewRetirement Planner can be specified by month.
6) New Charts Available On NewRetirement
NewRetirement’s charts are organized in one easy to access location. They offer a tremendous number of powerful charts, including 6 new ones. Seeing your information visually enables you to dive deep into your own data for helpful insights.
Charts include: overall lifetime projections, cash flow, Monte Carlo analysis, net worth, out of savings analysis, excess savings estimates, account balances, savings contributions, withdrawal projections, withdrawal strategy comparisons, how much savings you need, income & expense projections, state & federal tax brackets, tax liability estimates & deductions, Roth conversion opportunities and more.
7) Average, Best Case, Worst Case Retirement Scenarios
There is nothing “average” about your NewRetirement plan. Except, you can now model an average between all of your optimistic and pessimistic assumptions. The average will be applied to your score, charts and all aspects of your plan.
This is a great new way to assess the health of your plan – especially for a middle of the road option. When it comes to modeling out your financial future, I’ve always been a proponent of modeling a Bear Market, Realistic, And Blue Sky scenario.
8) A More Robust Help Center
You can also check out their Help Center. You will find FAQs, guides and video tutorials for how to do things in the Planner, and a new video series covering financial fundamentals.
9) The NewRetirement Classroom
NewRetirement now offers classes offering financial education. Take an 8-week introductory session designed to take you through setting up a holistic financial plan and educate you on the financial planning process.
Or, try the year-long program that goes in depth on tax planning, portfolio and asset allocation strategies, building your income plan, and meeting your goals for spending, stewardship, legacy, and asset transfer.
As a personal finance writer since 2009, I’m all for more financial education. Education is what will give us the courage to take action and be free.
10) Plan Ahead for Social Security
Deciding when to start Social Security can be challenging. If you (and your spouse, if applicable) haven’t started benefits, you can use the free Social Security Explorer — part of the NewRetirement Planner.
Easily compare how longevity and different start ages change your monthly and lifetime benefits. See work penalties and spousal benefits too.
Retirement Age Calculations
So, whether your goal is financial independence in your 30s or a traditional retirement at 65, NewRetirement has added functionality to help you assess the right time for you to retire.
11) More Control and Improved Financial Modeling
Now you can enter start and end dates as well as cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) on your annuities and pensions for more accurate modeling. Plus, customizable labels have been added for your monthly expense totals. This makes it easier to track why your spending changes over time.
Get more control over how your money is modeled by excluding any specific account from drawdowns to cover expenses. The Planner defaults to taking first from income, followed by tapping accounts in this order: taxable savings, tax-deferred accounts, Roths, then HSAs.
You can now exclude specific accounts from withdrawals as well. (And, use “Money Flows” to direct money to a specific expense.) Log in now to model excluding accounts and Money Flows…
In conclusion, there are 11 new enhancements and features to the NewRetirement Planner with more to come. Now you can run what if scenarios, model your current or projected investment properties, track passive income, and plan by months in addition to years.
In addition, you can access new charts, model an average between your best and worst assumptions, increase your financial knowledge through the NewRetirement Classroom, plan for Social Security and more.
The NewRetirement Planner is constantly being updated to use the latest figures available from the federal government for Medicare, Social Security wage limits, as well as state tax rates.
Start exploring the NewRetirement Planner today and take financial wellness into your own hands.
