Boldin vs. ProjectionLab: What Each Retirement Planner Documents

Boldin is the retirement planner that was called NewRetirement until 2024. The company announced the new name on September 3, 2024; its legal name remains NewRetirement, Inc., doing business as Boldin, and its press material says Steve Chen built NewRetirement and still leads Boldin as chief executive. [1] The paid version of the planner is called PlannerPlus. A separate entity, NewRetirement Advisors LLC, doing business as Boldin Advisors, is a registered investment adviser that sells flat-fee planning. [7] [8]

ProjectionLab is made by ProjectionLab LLC. Its about page says the founder, Kyle Nolan, started it as a solo developer and that it is now run by a small team; the public changelog has entries going back to 2021. [40] [51] The consumer plan is called Premium, and a Pro plan is sold to advisers and coaches. [41]

Both are web applications that build a long-range projection from what you enter: accounts, income, spending, a home, Social Security, and events such as retirement or a move. Boldin describes itself as a retirement planner and says plainly that it is not tax software, a budgeting app, or an asset allocation or cash management tool. [13] ProjectionLab's documentation says it models on a year-by-year basis, and its terms say the platform is not financial, tax or legal advice. [77] [43]

On November 14, 2026, Boldin's paid plan was $168 a year and ProjectionLab's was $129 a year, each billed annually after a free trial. The table gives the published terms of each plan and the paid help sold around it.

The two free plans are drawn differently. Boldin's pricing page keeps Monte Carlo analysis, the Roth Conversion Explorer, the Social Security Explorer and tax insights in PlannerPlus, and its assumptions article says the free plan applies a flat 3% state tax rate where PlannerPlus applies each state's rules. [2] [13] ProjectionLab's pricing page lists Monte Carlo simulations and historical backtesting under the free plan, and puts Roth conversions, tax optimization, withdrawal strategies, multiple plans, compare mode and downloadable reports under Premium. [41] ProjectionLab's pricing page does not spell out what the free plan saves between visits, so check that before entering a long plan.

Neither pricing page listed a lifetime price on the review date. ProjectionLab's changelog and its self-hosting notice refer to lifetime customers from earlier years, and its home page still mentions lifetime pricing, but no lifetime price was published on the pricing page itself. [41] [74]

The paid help differs in kind. Both sell a $250 session with someone who knows the software, and both say those sessions are not advice. [5] [6] [45] Only Boldin has an advisory arm. Boldin Advisors lists a Retirement Plan Checkup at a $3,200 flat fee and ongoing advisory from $1,200 a year, with certified financial planner professionals acting as fiduciaries and charging a flat fee instead of a percentage of assets. [7] Its Form CRS, dated June 3, 2026, says the firm does not provide ongoing investment management for retail investors, quotes hourly planning fees of $300 to $475 and project fees up to $6,000, and discloses a conflict: its advisers will recommend the Boldin website, in which the firm has a financial interest. [8] Read that two-page form before engaging any adviser; it is the standard plain-language disclosure every registered adviser must give retail clients. Our guide to choosing a financial adviser explains what to look for in one.

Boldin documents more built-in retirement-specific modeling for a US household: Medicare costs, long-term care, annuities, a reverse mortgage. ProjectionLab documents more ways to set up simulations, withdrawal rules and tax targets, and it supports planning outside the United States. The table lists what each company's pages say. “Not documented” means we found no statement on the pages we opened, not that the feature is absent.

Taxes

Both estimate federal and state income tax, capital gains tax and FICA, and both model the Medicare income surcharge known as IRMAA using income from two years earlier. [12] [14] [50] [54] Boldin is explicit about the edges of its tax model. It calls its estimates directional, uses each state's standard deduction for state tax, and lists the alternative minimum tax, estate and gift tax, and early-withdrawal penalties as outside the projection. [12] [13] Its net investment income tax estimate leaves out rental income, royalties and part of annuity income, so Boldin warns the figure may be understated for households with those. [15] ProjectionLab's documentation lists the net investment income tax among the taxes it estimates and describes state-level itemization, but we found no equivalent list of what its tax model excludes. [50] [51] Neither is a substitute for a tax return or a preparer.

Roth conversions

Boldin's Roth Conversion Explorer runs one of four named strategies and reports the years in which conversions may lower lifetime tax. The IRMAA strategy converts up to, but not over, the Medicare threshold you choose. [16] Its technical notes list limits worth knowing: the five-year rule is not modeled, ACA premium credits are not modeled, and you cannot pick which account is converted first. [17] ProjectionLab documents three routes: build a strategy from your own targets and constraints, choose a pre-configured one, or let the software test many and estimate the best. Its targets include federal brackets, IRMAA thresholds, ACA subsidy thresholds and custom income ceilings, and it cautions that no search can guarantee an optimal result. [55] [56] For the reasoning behind any of these strategies, see our guide to Roth conversions before RMDs.

Social Security, withdrawals and RMDs

Boldin sells a Social Security Explorer that compares claiming ages, break-even points and household spousal and survivor benefits. [18] ProjectionLab documents benefit entry or estimation, claiming ages from 62 to 70, spousal and survivor benefits, the earnings test and a setting to model reduced future benefits; its pages do not describe a claiming-age optimizer. [57] On withdrawals, Boldin documents a default account order and three strategies, with a custom order per account for paying members. [24] [25] ProjectionLab documents a customizable drawdown order and several named spending rules, among them variable percentage withdrawal and Guyton-Klinger guardrails. [51] [63] Both model required minimum distributions; Boldin states the starting ages it uses and notes that it may aggregate RMDs across accounts. [26] [49] Our guides to the retirement withdrawal order and the 4% rule cover the ideas these settings encode.

Health costs, long-term care, property and annuities

This is the widest documented gap. Boldin estimates Medicare costs from Medicare.gov data, including premiums, deductibles, prescriptions and out-of-pocket spending, and by default adds long-term care during the last 28 months of life unless you remove or change it. [27] [28] ProjectionLab adds Medicare premiums automatically as an expense, before any IRMAA surcharge, and treats ACA premiums as a separate expense whose growth you set; we found no dedicated long-term-care feature in its documentation. [65] [66] On annuities the positions reverse in clarity: Boldin documents entry of current and future annuities and pensions, while ProjectionLab says it does not yet have a dedicated annuity feature. [31] [70] For rental property, ProjectionLab documents automatic depreciation estimates; Boldin takes net rental income and says it does not handle depreciation. [68] [30]

Because a success percentage is a product of its assumptions, and the two tools document different ones. Entering the same balances and spending into each will not produce the same number, and neither number is wrong.

Boldin says it runs 1,000 iterations, drawing returns from a normal distribution, a bell curve, centered on the average rate of return you set, with a standard deviation it describes as reasonable for that return based on history. [19] The exact spread is not published. You can set a rate for each account or pick a portfolio model; Boldin's rate-of-return article lists a “Moderate” model at 8.08% as the default, and enter an average and it generates optimistic and pessimistic rates 20% above and below. [20] Its default inflation figures, 2.54% general and 3.36% medical, come from 1994 to 2024 data and can be replaced. [21] A run counts as a success only if savings stay at or above zero in every year; a dip below zero is a failure even if later income would have restored the balance. [22]

ProjectionLab calls its analysis Chance of Success. It documents up to 2,000 trials, with the number set by the data source and sampling method. [58] By default returns are sampled from historical market data, and the documentation names several sampling methods, including random start years and a block bootstrap that stitches together runs of consecutive years. [60] [51] If you supply your own rate, returns are modeled with a normal distribution, and you can define custom distributions. [60] [59] ProjectionLab also lets you change how success levels are defined and labeled. [61] Its pages do not state which historical dataset is used or the years it covers.

The practical use of either tool is comparison within it: run the plan, change one thing, and see which way the figure moves. Comparing an 87% from one product with a 92% from another says little. The guide on our Monte Carlo retirement calculator page works through why two calculators disagree on the same plan, with the assumptions shown.

In both cases, in the company's cloud. Neither documents a current local-only or offline mode.

Boldin says plan data is stored in data centers protected around the clock, that traffic between your browser and its servers uses 256-bit encryption, that it adheres to SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 controls, and that two-factor authentication is available. [34] If you link accounts, the connection runs through Plaid, MX or Mastercard's Finicity, and Boldin says it neither stores your bank credentials nor sends them to your browser. [10] [34] Its privacy policy, last updated June 29, 2026, says it does not sell personal information, and also says it works with a third party on advertising. [35]

ProjectionLab says it runs on Google Cloud Platform and Firebase, with data encrypted in transit and at rest, and that no linked accounts are required because there is nothing to link. [47] Its security page says it never sells data; its privacy policy says it does not sell or share personal information in the traditional sense and describes advertising partners with an opt-out. [47] [73] You can export a full copy of your data as a JSON file and restore from it. [72] A self-hosted version was made available to lifetime customers in 2023. In March 2025 ProjectionLab said future updates would be released to the web app only, while existing self-hosted installations keep working. [74]

The documented difference that matters most here is account linking. Linking saves retyping balances, and it means a third-party aggregator holds a connection to your financial institutions. Manual entry avoids that and leaves you to keep balances current yourself.

Neither gives advice, prepares a tax return or tells you what to invest in. Both describe their output as estimates.

• •Personal advice. ProjectionLab's terms say the platform is not financial, tax or legal advice, and its help pages call all calculations and optimizations estimates for educational purposes. [43] [55] Boldin's coaching pages say no fiduciary relationship is formed in a coaching session; advice is sold separately through Boldin Advisors. [6] [7]
• •Tax preparation. Boldin says it is not tax software and that its tax figures are directional. [13] [12] ProjectionLab makes the same kind of disclaimer in its terms. [43]
• •Holdings-level analysis. Boldin says it is not an asset allocation tool, that linked accounts bring in balances without cost basis or holdings, and that the plan runs on overall assumptions, not the performance of individual investments. [13] [11] ProjectionLab does not link to accounts at all. [46]
• •Estate and gift tax. Boldin lists estate, gift and generation-skipping tax as not modeled. [13] We found no ProjectionLab documentation describing federal estate tax modeling.
• •Phone support. Boldin states that it has none. [39] ProjectionLab's pricing page lists premium support without naming a telephone line. [41]

A projection is also only as good as what goes into it. Both tools will accept a spending figure that is too low or a return that is too high and report a comfortable result.

Two other groups: the free tools attached to brokerage accounts, and the professional software advisers use. A sentence or two on each, from its maker's own page.

• •Fidelity Planning & Guidance Center. Fidelity says the tool lets you create and monitor multiple independent financial goals, and that there is no fee to generate a plan, though the expenses of your investments still apply. [78]
• •Schwab Plan. Schwab says every client can get a complimentary financial plan, available with any Schwab account. [79]
• •Vanguard tools and calculators. Vanguard publishes a set of single-purpose calculators and worksheets, among them a retirement income calculator that checks whether savings are on track for your income needs, a retirement expenses worksheet and an inherited RMD calculator. [80]
• •RightCapital. Planning software sold to financial advisers and priced per adviser per month. RightCapital says clients reach its portal by invitation from a subscribed adviser. [81] [82]
• •eMoney Advisor. eMoney says it provides planning capabilities to help financial advisers serve their clients, under an adviser license, and that it supports banks, broker-dealers and registered investment advisers. [83] [84]

If you work with an adviser, the plan you are shown was probably built in software of the second kind, and you can ask to see the assumptions behind it: return, inflation, the number of simulations and what counts as success. Our comparison of Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard covers the brokerages' own planning and advisory services.

A full planner joins everything together, which is its point. Some questions stand alone, and a single-purpose calculator answers them without an account. My Finance Platform publishes free ones, each with its method shown: a Roth conversion calculator, a Monte Carlo retirement calculator, an RMD calculator and a Social Security break-even calculator. They do one thing each and do not store a plan or connect one answer to the next, so they are not a replacement for either product on this page.

These are trade-offs drawn from the documented differences above, not a ranking. Many readers will find either adequate, and both have a free plan and a trial to test your own case.

A reader whose plan turns on US retirement specifics, such as Medicare and IRMAA, a long-term-care assumption, an annuity or pension with a survivor benefit, and who wants balances to refresh and the option of paying a planner for a review, will find those things documented by Boldin. The trade-off is a single simulation method with an undisclosed spread, a US-only tax model and Monte Carlo behind the paywall.

A reader who wants to set the simulation up in detail, test a plan against history, apply spending rules that respond to markets, model rental property closely or plan across countries, and who prefers not to link accounts, will find those things documented by ProjectionLab. The trade-off is manual upkeep of balances, no dedicated annuity or long-term-care feature in the documentation, a shorter trial, and no advice from the company itself.

Whichever you try, enter the same plan you would give an adviser, change one assumption at a time, and write down which assumptions the answer is most sensitive to. That list is worth more than the headline percentage.