Personal Capital’s secondary financial planning tool is its free Retirement Planner. This is one of the most comprehensive retirement calculators out there. Offering more than other planning sites, Personal Capital provides long-term financial planning. The best and easiest part of using Personal Capital is keeping all of your information together and creating a planner and forecaster for the future.
These are some of the retirement features what you’ll find:
- Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner
- Fee Analyzer
- College Savings
Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner
With Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner, you can finally answer the question of whether or not you have saved enough for retirement, and with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Find out if you are on target for retirement.
This feature allows you to access spending goals and income events and project future portfolio value. The Retirement Planner pulls all of this together and tells you what kind of shape you’re in for retirement. They also have a Recession Simulator that can tell you how your portfolio would have performed during past recessions. This is an excellent resource for those concerned about the effects a recession can have on their portfolio.
Get a taste of the Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner:
There aren’t many good retirement-planning tools out there. Even the paid tools I’ve seen lack many features. Personal Capital’s tool is perhaps one of the most comprehensive I’ve seen — free or paid. There is a multitude of variables available in it. And you can play many what-if scenarios with your finances.
You do not have to enter your assets and accounts manually; it automatically populates the information. This feature is available on the website and the Apple and Android apps.
Retirement Paycheck — This feature provides users with guidance on how to withdraw money during retirement in the most tax-efficient way.
Fee Analyzer
This useful feature tells you how much your retirement plan is costing you. If your 401(k) is like most, the amount lost to fees will surprise you.
Similar to the Retirement Planner tool, Personal Capital’s 401(k) Analyzer determines the annual 401(k) expenses of the accounts you add within the service. Then, based on some assumptions that you can adjust, you can see the annual fees that are eating into your retirement plan over time.
In my family’s case, our annual expenses are just 0.38%. And at the time of retirement, the total cost of our retirement plans is expected to be over $500,000! That is half a million dollars lost to fees!
You need to pay close attention to the annual fees in your 401(k) plan.
College Savings
The Retirement Planner also allows you to set up a New Education Goal. If you have children, you can add each child by name and birth year and then indicate whether you want to save for college or are considering private school before college.
You can use this planner to compare the costs of colleges and determine your savings needs to meet your educational goals. Pulling in the average college costs by your state and the number of years you’ll have until your child goes off to school, Personal Capital calculates an amount you’ll need. It even adds in inflation. From there, the planner lets you know how much you need to save each month to be prepared.