No matter your age, it is incredibly important to have a comprehensive financial plan that includes budgeting, paying off debts, saving, and investing in some form or another. This is especially essential if you are planning for your retirement. You can hire a financial advisor, use the best financial planning software and try to handle everything yourself, or do both.
One thing that you definitely DO NOT want to do is to use cheap or “free” online tools and retirement software since they use outdated and generic data and can’t be trusted to be relevant to current financial trends. Their simple methods for “calculating” targets for saving and spending at best can be called “guesses”.
In other words, the best, most realistic software is going to cost money, but it makes an excellent investment as it provides so many features, resources, tools, reports, and pretty much everything you need for financial planning for your future and retirement.
What to Expect from the Best Financial Planning Software
What can you expect with the more “advanced” planners?
The more advanced features simulate hundreds of trajectories that you might experience giving your current spending behavior and investing strategies. You’ll be provided with the assistance you need to adjust your strategies and spending patterns to generate a different – ideally better – set of trajectories until you find the right balance of rewards and risks.
Note: a financial advisor still might be worth consulting with – at least on a part-time basis to help you understand the software and your options.
Are you more interested in getting the most out of your savings account and getting the ideal life insurance coverage more than anything else? Keep in mind that the best financial planning software will be personalized specifically for each and every user’s own individual needs.
If you’re still young and have decades to go before retirement, a feature to look for is one that will give you insight into housing decisions, career choices, and pre-set, ideal investment strategies for your portfolio.
What should you AVOID when it comes to financial planning platforms? Some common negative reviews about various platforms include a lack of intuitive user-friendly interface, unclear recommendations and convoluted reports, information that is TOO generic and unhelpful, and lack of flexibility in the program.
Data entry is important as well when it comes to planning your finances and/or retirement. Ideally, the data entry spread shouldn’t be too wide or complicated. There should not be any clicking required at all. The information should be there in front of you, clear and easy to see, yet with the specific details you need to know.
Overall, the best financial planning software is MaxiFi. It offers all of the helpful features mentioned above, and is popular with financial advisors as well. It comes with useful plans such as a Basic Plan, Maximized Plan, Progress Tracker, etc.