Adding my own two cents here, since I learned about Projection Lab from this thread.
I have so far tried E-Money (via Plan Vision paid and via Fidelity Full view), New Retirement paid, Pralana and started Projection Lab this week. I will abandon everything else and rely on Projection Lab moving forward.
Here is my perception of how these work.
E-Money.
Agree with the sentiment they are too old school, as in almost clunky and buggy web interface. E-Money has severe limits in how you can play with various important parameters like inflation, end of life, etc. The only plus side of it is the free consult you get, but that does not compensate for the shortcomings. Frankly, I don't think E-Money has any chance of becoming a top notch product as it is now owned by Fidelity. I don't think a large financial corporation can do software of this complexity well and they also have a conflict of interest, since that would canibalize at least some of their lucrative advising fees. Subscribed for a year and stopped.
New Retirement.
Subscribed a few months back and used it for a while. It is clearly better than E-Money (minus the direct connection to your accounts, which is lacking to the point of being useless), but has a lot of clunkiness and many inconsistencies in it as well. Some of the outflows are in today's money, some in future money and it is not easily apparent which. Things are organized rather haphazardly. The measure for success of the plan is based on the so called income score, but suffers from the issue of wild swings in output based on small changes in input parameters, which are very hard to explain. Sometimes you can figure it out by understanding some of the odd assumptions on money flows, but sometimes feels like they are plain bugs, which is not reassuring at all. Basically, I can't trust the results.
The nice advantage of it is that it gives you a nice Roth conversion plan. I really wanted to like it, but will pass for subscription renewal next year.
Pralana.
Super power and detailed, but it really goes overboard to the level of details. Very steep learning curve and the interface is severely limited by what Excel can do. Too many parameters that are way too detailed. Also, when things have an unexpected output, it is very hard to determine why. It is almost like you have a high performance car and you have physical knobs in it for every single engine parameter. It gives you an initial sense of super control, but then you quickly get lost and confused by all the details and I get a distinct feeling that I might have messed up with the wrong parameter and I don't trust the result.
Enter Projection Lab.
There is some learning curve, but it is rather shallow and it is based on concepts that are easy to understand. Some of the things I love:
- You can enter every asset with its own financial knobs. You can specify the value of a real estate and have full control of specifying any of the necessary parameters in very easy to understand manner. Can enter mortgage parameters and initial value (and will automatically detect remaining pay period), can specify insurance, taxes, maintenance, improvements either as a percentage or as an actual value, and how those might change in time, whether growing or having one off spending. Can specify within this asset if you want to make it a rental, when you want to sell it, how much you expect to appreciate, etc. Same goes for any other asset you might have, like cars, etc.
Basically, you don't need to create separate expense streams for any asset you enter and can specify replacement, etc.
- For all expenses you can specify every little thing you want in a very easy manner. You can indicate when it starts and ends, specific changes based on your age. The interface is super intuitive and clean. For example, I wanted to specify different travel budgets for go-go years from slow-go and no go. With other products I would have to enter different expenses for different years. Here I could specify very easily how these expenses would change based on my age or specific year. It has a very clean and flexibile way to specify expenses, either associated with a given asset, or easily modeled based on your age, expected inflation, etc.
Everything is in today's money, but you have options to specify future money, or even adjust to custom changes per asset and expense/time period.
You can tell the underlying data model is very rigorous and well thought out and the interface is very intuitive and responsive. Makes entering the dozens of various parameters you would expect so consistent and easy to understand.
But where it excels is the cashflow interface. It is an early snapshot with a very intuitive graph, which allows you to instantly validate every parameter that you enter and gives you full confidence in the results.
The interface for the Monte Carlo simulation is great and very detailed, without being overwhelming.
Countless other small things, such as ability to simulate very easy and totally understand and trust the impact, up to date tax bracket info, very responsive support via Discord, etc.
Some of the downsides, compared to others:
1. No linking to asset accounts. Not everybody cares about that, and considering the inconsistencies from other services I don't miss it at all. I just use a separate Excel model for other things anyway, so no biggie for me.
2. No strategy for Roth conversions. Not a big deal, you can enter manually and has a very intuitive interface to adjust it to optimize based on brackets. They are working on adding those features though.
3. Use of withdrawal strategy can be confusing when you have even mild complexity, such as a real estate property that you plan to liquidate. But that is a hard concept to model when you run into situations when you might run out of cash. There are ways you can work around that, but then you lose some of the confidence that things are ok.
Overall it is an impressive product with no match and I plan to use it exclusively moving forward. It is clearly developed by people with a strong data modeling background that understand how to model real financial systems and use the most modern UI elements to have a clean, responsive and trustworthy product.
It is so clean that it actually made me change how I track my budget and how I am thinking about different parameters of my financial situation in a way that makes everything so much more structured and clear.
It turns out I wrote a glowing product review, and in full disclosure I am still in the trial period (but will pay the yearly subscription) and I have absolutely no financial interest here.
I have so far tried E-Money (via Plan Vision paid and via Fidelity Full view), New Retirement paid, Pralana and started Projection Lab this week. I will abandon everything else and rely on Projection Lab moving forward.
Here is my perception of how these work.
E-Money.
Agree with the sentiment they are too old school, as in almost clunky and buggy web interface. E-Money has severe limits in how you can play with various important parameters like inflation, end of life, etc. The only plus side of it is the free consult you get, but that does not compensate for the shortcomings. Frankly, I don't think E-Money has any chance of becoming a top notch product as it is now owned by Fidelity. I don't think a large financial corporation can do software of this complexity well and they also have a conflict of interest, since that would canibalize at least some of their lucrative advising fees. Subscribed for a year and stopped.
New Retirement.
Subscribed a few months back and used it for a while. It is clearly better than E-Money (minus the direct connection to your accounts, which is lacking to the point of being useless), but has a lot of clunkiness and many inconsistencies in it as well. Some of the outflows are in today's money, some in future money and it is not easily apparent which. Things are organized rather haphazardly. The measure for success of the plan is based on the so called income score, but suffers from the issue of wild swings in output based on small changes in input parameters, which are very hard to explain. Sometimes you can figure it out by understanding some of the odd assumptions on money flows, but sometimes feels like they are plain bugs, which is not reassuring at all. Basically, I can't trust the results.
The nice advantage of it is that it gives you a nice Roth conversion plan. I really wanted to like it, but will pass for subscription renewal next year.
Pralana.
Super power and detailed, but it really goes overboard to the level of details. Very steep learning curve and the interface is severely limited by what Excel can do. Too many parameters that are way too detailed. Also, when things have an unexpected output, it is very hard to determine why. It is almost like you have a high performance car and you have physical knobs in it for every single engine parameter. It gives you an initial sense of super control, but then you quickly get lost and confused by all the details and I get a distinct feeling that I might have messed up with the wrong parameter and I don't trust the result.
Enter Projection Lab.
There is some learning curve, but it is rather shallow and it is based on concepts that are easy to understand. Some of the things I love:
- You can enter every asset with its own financial knobs. You can specify the value of a real estate and have full control of specifying any of the necessary parameters in very easy to understand manner. Can enter mortgage parameters and initial value (and will automatically detect remaining pay period), can specify insurance, taxes, maintenance, improvements either as a percentage or as an actual value, and how those might change in time, whether growing or having one off spending. Can specify within this asset if you want to make it a rental, when you want to sell it, how much you expect to appreciate, etc. Same goes for any other asset you might have, like cars, etc.
Basically, you don't need to create separate expense streams for any asset you enter and can specify replacement, etc.
- For all expenses you can specify every little thing you want in a very easy manner. You can indicate when it starts and ends, specific changes based on your age. The interface is super intuitive and clean. For example, I wanted to specify different travel budgets for go-go years from slow-go and no go. With other products I would have to enter different expenses for different years. Here I could specify very easily how these expenses would change based on my age or specific year. It has a very clean and flexibile way to specify expenses, either associated with a given asset, or easily modeled based on your age, expected inflation, etc.
Everything is in today's money, but you have options to specify future money, or even adjust to custom changes per asset and expense/time period.
You can tell the underlying data model is very rigorous and well thought out and the interface is very intuitive and responsive. Makes entering the dozens of various parameters you would expect so consistent and easy to understand.
But where it excels is the cashflow interface. It is an early snapshot with a very intuitive graph, which allows you to instantly validate every parameter that you enter and gives you full confidence in the results.
The interface for the Monte Carlo simulation is great and very detailed, without being overwhelming.
Countless other small things, such as ability to simulate very easy and totally understand and trust the impact, up to date tax bracket info, very responsive support via Discord, etc.
Some of the downsides, compared to others:
1. No linking to asset accounts. Not everybody cares about that, and considering the inconsistencies from other services I don't miss it at all. I just use a separate Excel model for other things anyway, so no biggie for me.
2. No strategy for Roth conversions. Not a big deal, you can enter manually and has a very intuitive interface to adjust it to optimize based on brackets. They are working on adding those features though.
3. Use of withdrawal strategy can be confusing when you have even mild complexity, such as a real estate property that you plan to liquidate. But that is a hard concept to model when you run into situations when you might run out of cash. There are ways you can work around that, but then you lose some of the confidence that things are ok.
Overall it is an impressive product with no match and I plan to use it exclusively moving forward. It is clearly developed by people with a strong data modeling background that understand how to model real financial systems and use the most modern UI elements to have a clean, responsive and trustworthy product.
It is so clean that it actually made me change how I track my budget and how I am thinking about different parameters of my financial situation in a way that makes everything so much more structured and clear.
It turns out I wrote a glowing product review, and in full disclosure I am still in the trial period (but will pay the yearly subscription) and I have absolutely no financial interest here.
Statistics: Posted by idc — Sat Jun 29, 2024 11:48 pm — Replies 25 — Views 4686