Goals-Only Financial Planner (GOFP)

Financial Planning Software Support

• Each goal has inputs specifically for integrating downloaded financial account data from most all custodians. So with just a few minutes of easy work once, you can get fresh investment values online from the custodian, and have all goals updated to reflect the current lump sum values in seconds. FYI: This is essentially the same thing you're spending the big money for with Money Guide Pro, but it takes a couple of minutes marrying each goal to it's download one time.

• Price will be 1% of whatever MoneyGuidePro is currently charging, so $12.50 a year.

• Ability to buy the Lifetime Subscription. The huge value there, is that you'll get all future updates for free, and if you wait, every few months there's a sale.

• We're not a huge corporation, so if you suggest something and/or find a bug, we can probably implement your suggestion and/or fix the bug within a week. Not only that, we'll reward you with free financial plan software. Make a suggestion to MGP and see what happens and/or see how many years it takes to get fixed.

How This Goalware Works

First, there's two parts to the main calculation engine: 1) Goals that have more than one annual payment, like retirement or college planning. There's ten of these. 2) Goals that just have a single future value, like buying something in the future. There's ten of these too, for a total of the GOFP being able to work with twenty goals in pre-retirement goalware mode.

One only has so much money to allot toward their goals in both lump sum and monthly payments. So you start by inputting these maximum amounts. Then you divvy this up between the goals. Then you input goal data. Then each goals' presentation tells you if you can reach it or not.

That's all there is to MGP - just fancy ways to display two kinds of numbers that you could have determined in a few seconds using any financial calculator. The rest is just how this information is organized, fake stress-tested, and then displayed. This is the hard part, and like the old saying goes, "The last 10% is 90% of the work!" Over the next few years, the way it will organize and display results will be far superior to any other goals-whatever vendor, regardless of the cost.

Now about the Monte Carlo simulator: In addition to what other vendors do, which is just iterating the rate of return, three sets of inflation (2%, 4%, and 6%) and two sets of worst-case Federal tax ranges are also used in order to not have the end result be from BizarroWorld.

Always keep in mind that using marginal tax rates in these situations is fake and bogus too. All that is just to make it look like one needs to invest more than they actually need to, in order to sell more life insurance company products. Only average tax rates, AKA effective tax rates, are valid.

So that's reason #976 why MGP is fake goalware. Someone would have to be realizing portfolio income of over $500,000 a year to be taxed at an average tax rate of 25% on investment income (including CA state taxes too). That's why hedge fund managers pay half the tax rate as their assistants - because their income is not "earned income" like employees. It's a combination of capital gains, dividends, and interest - all of which are taxed at rates about one half that as earned W-2 or 1099 income. It's programmed like that because taxes may be going way up in the future. That's what valid stress-testing is all about - accounting for future worst-case scenarios.

41 rates of return are used for a total of 252 iterations. MGP only uses 20 (they say they use 1,000, but their fine print says 20 - just like they used to say they used 10,000, but it really was only 75 until users read their very fine hidden print and whined). Yes, most everything about MGP is semi-bogus once you put on your thinking cap, find, read, and understand their "fine print," and get to the bottom of it.

All of this is to make it work using realistic numbers that simulate a diversified investment portfolio that a normal rational informed sane investor would hold long-term. The bottom line is that's how to program a Monte Carlo simulator to correctly perform a stress-test on a Real World investment portfolio. All this stuff MGP uses is so far out into fantasyland, that it's a total joke (and should be banned by the government).

Another bottom line comparing fake to real, is how long it takes to run the simulation. It takes 10 minutes with real financial planning software to iterate 252 times with a new fast computer. It takes the SGOP about five seconds, and the GOFP about two minutes to iterate 252 each on all 20 goals.

That's because there's little-to-no actual calculations going on with the SGOP or GOFP - which is why MGP's only takes a few seconds too; because it's fake and there's little-to-no actual calculations going on whatsoever. One is not stress-testing a financial plan, an investment plan, nor a Real World investment portfolio with the SGOP, GOFP, or MoneyGuide Pro.

With goals-only planners, one is just stress-testing at the most 20 simple Time Value of Money calculations, using at most 14 data inputs each, with little-to-no links to other modules. The IFP has hundreds of data inputs with tens of thousands of links to the other modules.

So the IFP (and our retirement software and college planners) are performing valid work of value, and MGP and the GOFP are not. Not even close enough to be in the same solar system. That's another way to look at the difference between real financial planning software, and goalware: If the Monte Carlo simulator takes under five minutes to run, then it's just not possible for it to be performing anything of any actual value - other than providing a quick fake number for sales presentation purposes.

The whole Monte Carlo thing has been morphed into a sales tool by goalware vendors to the point that Finra and the DoL should blanket ban it in all financial software used by BD Reps. It's just as simple as that. More about how the GOFP's Monte Carlo simulator works is at the bottom of the directions. End of the Monte Carlo rant.

Goals-oriented planners have little-to-no value to investors after their long term goals, e.g., retirement or college planning, have been met.

After retirement, MGP stops being in goal-focused fantasyland goalware mode, and then goes into a mode similar to the way our real retirement software works.

So other than their numbers being inaccurate everywhere, most goalware isn't blatantly fake after retirement begins.

The problem is that it's a calculation engine train wreck when pre-retirement goalware mode tries to be reconciled with actual non-fake retirement mode. MGP (and MoneyTree) fails miserably at this, and all of their numbers having anything to do with retirement planning are so inaccurate that it needs to be blanket banned.

The point here is that when retirement begins, then our simple Real World Retirement planners provide much more value, for only $100 to $250. In addition to the most accurate numbers in the industry, there's a long list of reasons, features, and functionality that makes MGP's after-retirement programming look like a total joke, compared to our RWRs - unless you're just using it to make a quick and easy commission-based product sale to an uninformed investor / consumer.

So after retirement begins, then just get Dual RWR, to get the best there is in this mode.

The same "modes" apply to the investment module(s). When working with these modules (either designing a custom portfolio, or using pre-existing models), you're not in the goalware world anymore either. Goalware only applies to generic financial planning before retirement.

Here the MGP Exterminator works similar to MGP: If the current portfolio is all cash, then the GOFP automatically selects one of our existing Model Portfolios. If not, then just use the Comprehensive Asset Allocation Software.

Again, and as usual, the list of limitations, fakeness, failures, and lameness with MGP's investment modules is just as long as the list of cool features in our investment software. It's a totally different world comparing what you can model with ours, compared to all other goals-whatever vendors.

The bottom line here is that MoneyGuidePro excels greatly in pre-retirement goalware, integration with other vendors, and slick phablet presentations. But once you're out of that module and mode, their "financial planning software" is not competitive, especially compared to ours. It just doesn't perform many functions of value, and costs several times as much as ours, which performs most all functions users want (other than the integration with other vendors, which most of the time, you can do yourself in a few minutes).

So the main Goals-Only engine is only $12.50. This will (eventually) get you the same thing as MGP, when in it's in the pre-retirement goalware mode.

Then after that, when you're in non-goalware retirement mode, you have to input so much data, that it makes no sense to use MoneyGuidePro. With less input (that makes little-to-no sense, as explained here) and fussing around, you could have more accurate numbers in a real retirement plan using Dual RWR.

If you want to create a snapshot of a balance sheet (or project net worth into the future), then using our Net Worth Calculator will also do that (give you more accurate numbers, quicker and easier, with less confusing input fuss than MGP).

If you want to create an asset allocation mix, then ditto there too.

If you want to use pre-existing Model Portfolios, then ours are vastly superior to anything MGP could ever come close to creating.

If you want to calculate accurate life insurance needs, then ditto there too, as the MGP Exterminator will allow you to automatically calculate true life insurance needs with minimal input and maximum understandability.

Then it will use the Social Security analysis sheet from the TVM Calculators to crunch those number correctly for a change.

That's about it, that's all there is to MoneyGuidePro, and all other goals-whatever planners, unless you want to become an expert by reading our review pages.

So there's a bundle called The MoneyGuidePro Exterminator, that gives you all of the above modules for only $500. Note that just the Model Portfolios cost that much by themselves. That's how much we want you to abandon BizarroWorld, and get with reality!

Prices may change greatly upward after it has matured.

The free thirty-day trial period is available for the Goals-Only Financial Planners