Release Notes

Release Notes

A summary of all the cool features and improvements our team has been hard at work on.

In Progess

  • Add Financial Wellness Report
  • Allow pretax, Roth, and after tax dollars within a 401k or 403b
  • Allow pretax and Roth dollars within a 457b
  • Create a page for all connections to enhance the account linking experience
  • Update the standalone Roth Conversion Calculator with tax information for 2024. Add the Standard Deduction for age 65 and an inflationary factor to IRMAA thresholds.

March

  • Update Social Security estimates with 2024 data
  • Allow users to automatically apply the Roth Conversion Explorer suggestions to their plan
  • Update Roth Conversion Explorer to suggest conversions in 2024
  • Estimate IRMAA when a user chooses to itemize Medicare Expenses
  • Include IRMAA in Estimated Expenses chart and CSV

February

  • Update state income tax information for 2024
  • Add auto escalation to dollar amount contributions
  • Add tiered employer match
  • Add start/end date selection enhancements to support current year modeling
  • Include all (past, present and future) one time events (One Time Expenses, Disbursements, Transfers and Roth Conversions etc.) in the current year calculations

January

  • Add new account linking providers and restore connection to Fidelity and TSP
  • Update Federal income tax information for 2024
  • Add non elective contributions
  • Add employer match to HSA accounts
  • Add contribution limits
  • Increase the default long-term care expense
  • Update Retirement Readiness and Account Types courses

December

  • Current year year model update to allow for end of year planning: follow ons and bug fixes

November 2023

  • Current year model update to allow for end of year planning

October 2023

  • Introduced a new rule-based Roth Conversion Optimizer algorithm variant to limit annual conversions by IRMAA income bracket in order to minimize or eliminate IRMAA premiums
  • Updated IRMAA income limits and associated PartB/PartD costs to the new 2024 values

September 2023

  • New printable report
  • Courses accessible to all PlannerPlus subscribers

May 2023

  • Added New Mexico state rules for calculating taxable social security benefits
  • Michigan state flat tax rate updated from 4.25% down to 4.05% for 2023

April 2023

March 2023

February 2023

January 2023

  • Updated our RMD calculations to reflect the new SECURE 2.0 act rules that increased the start of RMDs to ages 73 or 75, depending on when you were born.

December 2022

  • A brand new Scenario Comparisons tool is live that allows you to not only compare the optimistic, average, and pessimistic projections of one scenario but compare up to 3 different scenarios.

Let’s dive in

  • Step 1
  • Step 2
  • Step 3

November 2022

  • Shipped a new Scenarios page to make it easier to manage scenarios, make new ones, and designate any scenario as your baseline.
  • We now store account balances so that, in the future, we can produce historical account balance charts.

October 2022

  • Launched a learning management system so that members can easily attend all of their financial literacy classes.
  • Increased the maximum number of scenarios per plan to 10.

September 2022

  • New First-Time User Experience (FTUE) that offers instant value to new members as soon as they finish onboarding.
  • Introduced a Social Security Summary in My Plan that gives bite-sized insights into your Social Security benefits, including your estimated monthly benefit, survivor benefit, and total benefit across your lifetime.

August 2022

  • Refreshed the onboarding experience for new members.
  • Upgraded our account linking product with Plaid so that accounts update daily.
  • Redesigned loginsignup, and newsletter pages.
  • Released a new standalone annuity calc that will also be part of our API product.
  • Added Digital Coach Suggestions to let members know if they have expenses, disbursements, or Roth conversions that lack sufficient funding.
  • The Roth Conversion Explorer no longer recommends 1st-year conversions.
  • Several modeling changes to improve data accuracy, including changing the default account turnover rate for new investment accounts to 0% and changing the growth rate of the default account to 0% so that it acts as cash.

July 2022

June 2022

  • Shipped a toggle to see the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) sunset that is slated for the end of 2025.
  • Tuned up the Roth Conversion Explorer algorithm to recommend more realistic conversion strategies while maintaining performance.
  • Changed the tax treatment of the default account to be taxed as ordinary income instead of at long-term capital gains rates.

May 2022

  • Several quality-of-life improvements, such as clarifying to whom tax-advantaged accounts belong, making it harder to enter nonsensical dates, and showing a mortgage payoff date that reflects all payments (including lump-sum transfers) in the milestones report.

April 2022

  • Complete overhaul of the income-linked contribution UX
  • Rebuilt the Roth Conversion Explorer algorithm to produce better optimizations using half as many lines of code. It now runs twice as fast and has a “quick check” side functionality that can very quickly decide if any sort of optimization is possible.
  • Improved account linking capabilities by supporting Plaid’s Account Select v2

March 2022

  • Upgraded the customer journey and coach suggestions via new displays on the dashboard, a new “Your Progress” page, and added filters (and a modified UI) to the suggestions page
  • Added and improved white-label features on the core planner app for our enterprise partners
  • Modified several tax-related assumptions applying to social security and RMDs
  • Bug fixes: windfalls and one-time expenses after primary longevity age date are now properly modeled, several charting display issues are improved, and a minor corner case with future relocations is no longer happening
  • Added TCJA modeling capability to the API product

February 2022

  • Extended retirement age variable to be used across all relevant payment streams
  • Shipped a new plan progress section to more easily see and navigate to plan completion items

January 2022

  • Planner users can now link savings contributions to income streams, making their plan more accurate and easier to maintain
  • Planner users also have the option to add employer matching savings streams alongside their income-linked contributions
  • Upgraded our simple retirement calculator mini-tool so that enterprise and content partners are now able to easily embed the tool into articles, blog posts, and other websites

December 2021

  • Launched the new Classroom offering
  • Various bug fixes including improvements to our net worth calculation, social security benefits logic, and optimizers

November 2021

  • Launched a new feature enabling retirement age to be a variable input that can be utilized to update multiple payment streams at once
  • Launched in Planner app the ability to change an account’s rate of return over time (for example, reduce the risk/return profile of an account once a user reaches retirement)

October 2021

  • Enhanced accounts to allow changing rates of return over time in our API product, with month-year granularity
  • Enhanced income-linked user contributions in our API product to allow for annual % or $ increases to contribution amount

September 2021

  • Added the ability to exclude specific accounts from the standard withdrawal order.
  • Added the ability to update key info in multiple accounts in one screen.
  • Upgraded our age/date pickers in key places (full roll-out across the planner coming next month).
  • Updated our tax treatment for deductible disbursements.
  • Added a spending power metric to supplement our API analytics product offering for enterprise clients.

August 2021

  • Launched a brand-new UIUX for My Plan – big changes, take a look if you haven’t yet! The new design is a beautiful, modern, mobile-friendly app that makes it simpler to find and input data and much easier to view the forecasted results and impact of changes to your plan.
  • Launched an enterprise-facing API toolkit that allows any organization to build best-in-breed financial planning and forecasting tools. Contact us to learn more.
  • Built a number of powerful features into the API which will be included in the consumer-facing app over the next few weeks. These include income-linked contributions with optional employer-matched contributions, varied account returns over time, variable start times on pension and annuity COLAs, and more.
  • Updated payments infrastructure to utilize Stripe.

June 2021

  • Improved the free Retirement Calculator
  • Enhanced the Monte Carlo calculation to more accurately capture the range of plan outcomes
  • Multiple back-end enhancements in anticipation of upcoming app improvements

April 2021

  • Launched a partnership with Marketwatch with a dedicated site for MW users
  • Added the option to review your ‘average’ plan assumptions in addition to optimistic and pessimistic
  • New Insights Library to highlight the various graphs, charts, and explorers available
  • Improved our Monte Carlo modeling and data visualization, and applied Monte Carlo analysis to optimistic and pessimistic assumptions (in addition to average assumptions, which was already happening)

February 2021

  • Multi-year scheduled withdrawals now available
  • Social security claiming is now done by month (previously, it was limited to a given year)
  • Updated lifetime income projection chart with net savings drawdowns

January 2021

  • New Coach page
  • Expanded access to the Beta Roth Conversion Explorer
  • Bug fixes for capital gains/estimated tax reporting and a few other small items

December 2020

  • Customizable labels across multiple accounts, expenses, and other items
  • Updated Onboarding flow for new users

November 2020

October 2020

  • Launched new retirement calculator
  • Updated new dashboard design

September 2020

  • Launched new dashboard beta
  • Centralized accounts such that balances and other permanent data fields stay in sync across scenarios
  • Updated the blog in a few places, including new hub pages and more

August 2020

  • HSA / 529 Account support added along with related tax forecasting improvements.
  • Services API architecture updated and moved to Rails – 30% faster, more maintainable and scale-able.
  • Better instrumentation across our customer life cycle.
  • Fixes & improvements across Financial Projections, Account Linking and Monte Carlo.
  • Initial help section with “how to” articles & videos. (see the magnifying glass in the Planner header)

July 2020

  • Monte Carlo (Beta) – 1,000 simulations – running on AWS Lambda so we can scale this
  • Social Security – automatically adjust benefit based on claiming date
  • We started making Product Tours – still in progress and we’re adding videos

June 2020

  • Account Aggregation – you can now link your accounts so that your plan will be kept up to date.
  • Assets (Bank, Brokerage, 401K, etc) and
  • Debts (Mortgage, Credit Cards, etc)

May 2020

  • PlannerPlus Live – aka dedicated coaching support for your Plan

April 2020

  • Google Authentication for Login (including underlying data/authentication model)
  • Migrated to modern WordPress & updated theme.
  • Site speed improvements
  • Improved one time financial event handling for RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions) and Charting

March 2020

  • Completed porting the entire Planner to React.
  • Improved tax modeling for one time taxable events.
  • Tax modeling improvements – cap gains, investment income, inherited IRAs, state tax tuning.
  • Implemented state specific income tax rules.
  • RMD modeling updated for spouses > 10 years younger.
  • Add Federal tax only for pensions & annuities.
  • Add FICA and Medicare/SDI tax modeling.

February 2020

  • Optimize Withdrawals 1.0 – new disbursement controls for Inherited IRAs, charitable giving, etc,
  • Improve home equity modeling
  • Improve navigation

January 2020

  • Withdrawals 1.0
  • Allow users to specify tax treatment on investment accounts
  • Cloud migration – all on AWS (Amazon Web Services)