Cash Flow-Based vs. Goals-Whatever Financial Planning Software

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Another bottom line is that a true financial adviser always has their HP-12C with them (the one and only true financial calculator). Try to find an MGP user with an HP-12C or that knows how to work Excel on a Windows PC. You won't.

These unskilled hacks are an entirely different breed of "financial adviser" that popped up about 2005. No financial brains, just a smiley mouth spewing hyperbole as they wow you with flashy graphics.

Occam's Razor all applies here: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. After thinking about all of this for almost three decades, these are the bottom lines when it comes to adviser's choice of financial plan software.

Wall Street firms just really need those dozens of thousands of dummy advisers out there moving their products, so the tools to maximize that were created.

In 1980 it was fixed annuities, because of the double-digit yields. In 1985 it was limited partnerships to save taxes. In 1990 it was pink sheet stockbrokers cold calling from the phone book. In 1995 everyone was earning tons of money, so tax qualified plans were all the rage. In 2000 it was day trading technology that allowed the sheeple to lose their life savings in a day. In 2005 it was ETFs and fixed annuities again because of flat and down markets. In 2010, it was the MoneyWhatevers creating goalware. In 2015 it's the same, but greatly updated, goalware running on phablets in restaurants.

It's just the tools that the masses of rookie Reps currently use that results in the best shot at short-term BD survival (but long-term failure as a financial adviser). So whatever the current fad is, Wall Street has a new and improved tool for their salespeople to peddle their products to the sheeple with minimal resources expended.

There's no way around these huge problems. If you want real financial numbers, then you'll have to use real financial software - which is "hard to use." Everything to do with money is "hard." If it's not hard, then you're just not doing it right! That's why real financial advisors make the big bucks - because they actually earn it.

It takes decades of education, skill honing, trial and error, becoming an expert at Windows / Excel / HP-12Cs / and other financial tools, and then knowing how to manage money and create valid financial plans - in order to consistently earn these big bucks from people that have them.

Why do all of that when you can just hook up to a BD and use MGP!? Yup, just bypass the whole decades-long learning curves, pretend you know what you're doing, and fake it!

Dummy advisers get into the business because they're selfish and greedy and really want these big bucks. That's why all of these "robo-advsier" sites are the current thing (that will fail). They just do not want to do the actual hard work needed to earn them. That's why they (MGP users) usually last a year or two in the biz, and then quit and go back to their old day jobs. It just takes them that long to realize that there really is no free lunch (contrary to the belief of their BD that got them into this mess, and then made them buy MGP).

If you use MGP thinking their numbers are real, then you're just "peeing in the wind," because that's just not possible. That metaphor was used because in the financial business, most all "mistakes" will eventually come back to haunt you in one way or another. Occam's Razor again: That's why your "MGP financial adviser" gave up and went back to their old day job. It was only a matter of time before their clients realized they were a fraud and fired them.

Like the comedian says, "You can't fix stupid!" So that's the short version of why things are the way they are. The very long versions are in the financial planning software reviews and the free Money eBook.

So the IFP's target markets are DIY investors and fee-only RIAs that are in the business of trying to accurately forecast what will happen in the future financially with their clients. This is what financial planning is supposed to be about, and not moving life insurance company products for the biggest short-term commissions.

DIY investors should never use fake financial plan software for their own financial planning. If you're going to do something important, then you should get the right tools for the job, and then do it right the first time - even if it's "hard."

If you don't, then you should know that money does not magically grow back after you make such colossal blunders. Here's one example of such a blunder - in 2012 I found an egregious bug in NaviPlan that made it look like one could retire one to two years earlier than they actually could. They scrambled and fixed it in a few months. But everyone that took that advice, eventually found out that they did not actually have enough money to last until their life expectancy. How many lives were ruined (and how many deaths were caused) because of just that? And that was NaviPlan - a big firm that really cares about having accurate numbers. None of the MoneyWhatevers even care, and their documentation even says that their numbers are fake past the first year.

In case you didn't know, after your money is gone, it's just gone forever. So if you fail, then you'll have nobody to blame but yourself - as you're eating Alpo instead of steak in your golden years.

As BD Reps become less willing to do real work over time, goalware has become more sophisticated, dumbed-down, insidious, deceptive, fake, cool, fancy, flashy, modern and techie-looking, and integrated to meet that ever-increasing demand by Black Hat Dark-side advisers that are the epitome of modern-day snake oil peddlers.

When they feel good about their snake oil salesmen, they don't whine to the law, so nothing happens to stop it. Then even if there was mass outcry, the government would ignore it, because they've been forced to be a part of this Wall Street Cabal since the beginning of time.

"Think, analyze, spend time, do actual work, pay attention with an ever-decreasing attention span? HA! It's easier to just trust my "financial planner." After all, he's regulated by the mighty Unites States government, right? What could possibly go wrong with that? So I'll sign and give them my money today so I can forget all about it and get back to pacifying my needs with sugar, fructose, caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, and both legal prescription and illegal drugs."

When they feel good about their snake oil salesmen, they don't whine to the law, so nothing happens to stop it. Then even if there was mass outcry, the government would ignore it, because they've been forced to be a part of this Wall Street Cabal since the beginning of time.

The short version here is that the regulators, Finra, and the people that brought you goalware, American Funds, and uber-expensive life insurance company products are ALL THE SAME PEOPLE (that job hop between the Cabal's five players)!

That's right, Finra is an SRO (Self Regulatory Organization). In other words, they regulate and police themselves. That's little better than having The Mafia control the cops and the FBI, and then wondering why the same crimes that occur thousands of times a day go unpunished. Beginning to see the magnitude of the failure, and how sweet life is when you're part of The Cabal?

So, like it or not, that's why things are the way they are cannot be "fixed." Yes, this whole multi-billion dollar industry is just as simple to understand as that.

Here's the medium version about why things are the way they are (the long version is here): Leaders of most financial planning software companies only care about "show me dat uber Wall Street money today," and couldn't care less if their software performs accurate functions of value, nor is good for anyone in any way - other than Broker Dealer Reps being able to use it to hard-sell life insurance company products and American Funds.

They are a creature of Wall Street - and that whole thing is about doing everything legally possible to not care about anything, while screwing everyone over just to get rich quick today.

So the whole money-fest between the life insurance companies / Broker Dealers / American Funds / MoneyGuidePro / the "government" (mostly Finra) is the best thing ever invented to be tall by standing on the backs of your customers to get rich at everybody else's expense.

Then when the Finra regulator gets tired of their dull low-paying job, their reward for doing their part in keeping The Cabal intact, is a cushy six-figure position with full perks in a corner office suite at AIG. So it's a revolving-door of cronyism in Wall Street, just like government politicians everywhere.

That whole love-fest is a symbiotic relationship that has resulted in expensive fake financial software that's nothing more than flashy sales tools. Zero beef, all fake and fancy colorful fluff, and the government has been pressured into making it all just fine.

The most profitable business model for them (considering BD Reps are by far the biggest market) these days is to put everything on a cloud-based server, and then charge 100% annual renewal rates.

Little problem with that - it's just not possible for a cloud server to perform the required complex financial calculations that will produce accurate financial plans. It's not possible to code it in the first place, it would be too expensive to maintain, it would take way too long to calculate, be too "hard to use," no server would be able to handle more than a dozen users at a time, and it would constantly break and fail.

To make that work would require resources on the scale of the Manhattan Project. Morningstar tried to make the Holy Grail of Financial Software in their market (Direct) and they failed spectacularly - and still are going on over ten years into it. So in order to profit, they'd have to charge $10,000 a year. Nobody is going to buy that, nor wait for more than a second without throwing a tantrum when "the internet is slow."

This is because the cost of such a magic server that could handle this level of workload (and the army of way too-expensive programmers to maintain it) would be so many gazillions of dollars, that "show me dat uber money today" can't happen. For the money-fest to continue, they'd have to charge $25,000 a year. Nobody will buy it over $5,000.

This explains why NaviPlan changes ownership almost every decade like a hot potato. Since estate planning went away (thus greatly reducing the need for NaviPlan), the choice is to perform actual work and get a good plan using NaviPlan for $2,200+, or fake it using MoneyGuidePro for a grand less.

The average BD Rep is thinking, "Hmmm, with NaviPlan, I have to spend more money, think, be an actual professional, do more work, have to actually Fact Find to determine what's suitable for the client, know how to work a computer while sober and think with an already virtually non-existent attention span, and earn my income for a change by making an actual financial plan. Then because I'm too lame to read their software directions, I'll be on their support line forever - if they even bother answering the phone at all, OMG!!! Or I could just change my business model to "faking it." Then I can use MGP for a grand less, not have to use my brain nor do anything "hard" to earn my money, save time, my BD life insurance company overlords will be appeased, and I'll make more money. What a no-brainer!"

So that answers why MGP has been taking market share from NaviPlan since 2013 (when the need for estate planning ended for most people). As time goes on, everyone becomes dumb and dumber, so the money software they are able to use needs to be dumbed-down more and more just for them. So NaviPlan is even doing that now. Around 2014, Advicent started making their own dumbed-down "lite" version of goalware - just to survive after those back-stabbing good 'ol Cabal boys that used to invite them to the money-fest orgies double-crossed them.

With cloud coding, there is usually little-to-no transparency, control, flexibility, truth, accuracy, power, or control of printed reports. This is because all of that takes actual computing horsepower that cloud servers cannot yet provide.

The whole cloud thing is about reducing expenses to the bare minimums, not increasing them. So everything to do with that is about making it go faster by cutting corners, cheating, lying, omitting, erroring, and just faking it. If it were performing financial work of value, then it would be so slow that users would whine. The only way to fix that would be to spend gazillions on faster better servers. This would cut into the software vendor's profits too much, and we can't have any of that (because their services and profits are required to keep the Cabal's money-fest going).

So thereyago - mystery solved: Cloud servers can't perform financial functions of value because that takes too much computing power, which takes too much time and costs too much work and money. This defeats the original purpose that led the leaders of the goalware firms to do all of this in the first place - to profit today at everyone else's expense, and to be a player in this Wall Street money-fest Cabal.

So everything on the software side is dumbed-down as much as possible to spit out ANY number in the least amount of time - fake or not. As long as it sells that annuity TODAY - then it's a win for everyone.

The only loser is the investor - which is always last on the list of whom Wall Street cares about. Yes, this is all legal, and functions perfectly as their creators intended.

So the end result is all of this $1,500 to $3,500 a year goalware. It even has brand names - goal focused / goals focused / goal-based / goals-based / goal this that and the other - basically every way you can switch up the word "goal" without violating the other fake software vendor's trademark.

All fake, too expensive, and should be permanently banned; all because that's what financial advisers are forced to buy from their Broker Dealers to make those short-term commission quotas today - or be fired tomorrow as a total loser that couldn't make it on Wall Street.

In case you still don't get it, here's how this good 'ol boy Wall Street Cabal works: The big life insurance companies own the big Broker Dealers. So they get to force their army of salespeople (Finra BD Reps) to go out and hard peddle mostly life insurance company products - like whole life insurance and annuities. They do this by forcing Reps to buy and use goalware, like MGP. They do this by only "approving of" MGP.

The Broker Dealers run Finra. That's right, the "cops" are allowed to govern themselves, whowuddathunk? This is because Finra is an SRO (Self Regulatory Organization). Finra is comprised of "members." These members are the Broker Dealers. Since most of the big BDs are really just minions of the life insurance industry, the bottom line is that the life insurance industry controls and runs Finra.

This is just like primitive corruption cronyism of Russia, China, and North Korea. Whatever feeds the fearless leaders and keeps them in power, their money-fest the best fed, and ensures no possible changes can be made to The Cabal is what works best on Wall Street. That's the way it has always been, it's the way it is now, and it's the way it will always be.

The BDs and the life insurance companies then get with the current "financial plan software" vendor that has the best chances of moving the most in life insurance company products, and American Funds.

Before estate planning died out, they were pouring dozens of millions into NaviPlan. This is because estate planning was all about selling massive amounts of whole life insurance and annuities.

Then estate planning died out in 2013 via the new tax laws. So they stopped funding NaviPlan, because that whole business model ran its course and is no longer the best way to feed The Cabal. So without this free pile of money constantly feeding them, NaviPlan has been struggling to survive standing on its own. So now they're making goalware too.

The BDs and the life insurance companies still need to keep that money-fest going, so they needed a new software platform to keep their commission-based products moving.

So the best option was to shun NaviPlan and start supporting MoneyGuidePro.

So they (the BD-life company Cabal) do everything they can to only "approve" of MoneyGuidePro for their sales force to use.

Then since they control Finra, they pretty much told them that MoneyGuidePro is what they need to support - regardless of the harm it's causing to the investing public.

How can you tell? Because Finra won't review financial plan software if it has a Monte Carlo simulator. Except, if it's MGP, NaviPlan, or a vendor friendly to The Cabal. Then that rule of disavowing Monte Carlo is ignored.

So all attempts to get Finra to "do something" about the fraud that is MoneyGuidePro fails.

If you don't believe this, then contact Finra and ask to talk with the people in charge of dealing with money software that BD Reps can use. You will experience the ultimate in government employees running away and hiding for cover, obfuscating, pretending to not having a clue about what you're talking about, getting transferred to voicemails that are never answered, passing the buck, pointing you in other directions, and basically doing everything they can to get you to just give it up and go away. You will get zero straight answers 100% of the time.

Regardless of what you do, you will get nowhere - unless you are inside The Cabal itself. This is easy to prove - just contact them and see for yourself. This is one of the last bastions of "legal evil" in America that cannot ever be "fixed."

In just about everywhere else in America where this type of Cabal is exposed, it's usually gone within a decade. That's not going to ever happen with Wall Street. They have ALL of the gold, power, and money and that is just the way it is and there's nothing anyone can do to change that in any way.

Then American Funds is also in this Cabal, as the preferred commission-based mutual fund provider. If the customer won't be hard-sold into buying a life insurance company product, then they have to buy something. That something is commission load sales charge on mutual funds. What feeds the money-fest the best is to have one good 'ol boy to fill this roll, and then use their profits to fund the pool of money they need to swim in. This has been American Funds since the early 80's. Then to keep the number of players in The Cabal's inner circle of trust's to the minimum, there can only be one (just like with the ONE "preferred" software vendor - MGP). So this ONE is American Funds - always has been, is now, and always will be.

Then the Certified Financial Planner program now allows MGP to be used to create the final financial plan needed to graduate. Basically the outcry of people too dumb to use actual financial plan software to make an actual financial plan was so great, that the world's main formal educator in making financial plans had to capitulate to this absurdity. They had no choice because their students are so dumb, that they'd fail to create an actual financial plan using real cash flow-based software. Then they'd fail the whole program. The outcry from all of these failed students was and/or would be just too much to deal with. So they just capitulated and are letting students use goalware to cheat their way into passing their final Bar Exam.

That's how bad things have become. You'd think that a CFP graduate would be competent in making financial plans. WRONG! That hasn't been so for at least seven years now. So thanks to The Cabal, everyone is so dumb and the system is so broken, that this group of so-called industry-leading professionals are not even barely competent at performing their primary functions anymore.

CFP candidates spend all that money, endure the screening and work requirements process, and go through that whole two plus year ordeal to become "certified," and then they can't even perform the main function they became certified to perform! The administrators of the program don't like it either, but they're powerless to do anything about it, because as the comedian says, "You can't fix stupid!" Everyone just agrees that this is a problem that can't be solved, so it's swept under the rug in hopes that nobody will talk about it.

So nowadays, even CFPs are "fake" financial planners that fail to create financial plans. So their certification becomes more meaningless by the day (which was reason #176 that I voluntarily relinquished my marks in 2003).

Everywhere you look, The Cabal has all of their bases covered to ensure that the life insurance companies control most everything in the financial services industry. All public cries to the government fall on deaf ears, because doing anything about anything would require one of these players in The Cabal to be decoupled from the orgy. If any one of them were to leave the party, then the whole Cabal would fail the other four players.

Then to complete this money-fest circle of feedback loops, the generic government bureaucrats and politicians (Congress) are "paid off" to do everything they can to ensure that nothing in this Cabal ever changes. There's plenty of gold to go around, so political contributions are in the billions annually to ensure nobody even knows about The Great Wall Street money-fest Cabal - that have kept them all uber rich for all time, and everyone else permanently and uber screwed.

The average citizen knows deep down that "Wall Street is rigged to screw the little guy," but they don't know the actual mechanics of how this is actually done. So this is just one example.

Why would the politicians care if the public is angry about all of this? All they care about is getting re-elected. The free uber money from this Cabal is plenty to fund their election campaigns, and to defeat everyone that opposes The Cabal. Once you have the money needed to win elections, why care about what the electorate wants? They're not the ones feeding you enough to keep you in power, so what they want doesn't matter. All that matters is not biting the hands that feed you. This is just normal life in America.

The image below shows an example of MoneyGuidePro's deceptive business practices. What they're doing here is pretending their software is not fake, and then trying to get you to believe that the US Department of Labor "approves" of MGP's "quality financial planware."

Just a few minor issues with this top-level deception: First, in order to create a financial plan, one must use actual financial planning software. This means one has to either use our IFP, or NaviPlan, because MGP is the leader in goalware, and thus is incapable of producing an actual financial plan - even a "low-quality" plan. MGP is not financial planning software, so it's not capable of producing even a low-quality financial plan.

Next, a quality financial plan can't be created unless the user accounts for all of the mundane details that are needed to create a real financial plan. Little minor details like inputting budget and cash flow incomes and expenses, accounting for annual surpluses and deficits and replacement costs, performing an actual investment risk tolerance test instead of having a BD Rep randomly move a meaningless slider, and an endless of critical Real World variables that MGP just completely ignores.

Next, they may be surprised that the government is not is as oblivious, nor as easy to get to rubber-stamp approval of Wall Street shenanigans, as they have been in the past. What they're doing here is thinking that, and hoping that, the government remains oblivious to reality, and just keeps believing that MGP is actually financial plan software.

This time may be different. The government may have grown enough brain cells to finally get it on this round of at least attempting to actually do something to fix all of these massive failures. In which case, someone with the required attention span will eventually get around to calling shenanigans, and banning goalsware software completely. All one needs to do is read the image below, figure out how MGP actually works, and then it should be obvious that the two things are diametrically opposed to each other - and thus the text in the image is just a big fat lie that needs to go the way of the dinosaurs.

MGP is the kind of software that is THE epitome of what the government needs to ban, if they want advisers to start acting like fiduciaries, instead of used car salesmen. So MGP is trying every dirty trick in the book to deflect attention away from the fact that DOL is out to change the color of advisers' hat from black to white.

MGP is the #1 "enabler" in the industry that allows advisers to keep their hats as black as possible. In other words, if MGP was banned, more than half of unsuitable investment recommendations (if you want to call life insurance company products investments, which is laughable), would magically vanish overnight.

So they have a team of high-paid marketing lobbyists pulling out all the stops to ensure these deceptions continue to wreak havoc on investors for all time. And they're the best in the industry too. You probably have read this and thought, "Okay, so MGP is working with the DOL to ensure it makes quality financial plans that meet the new fiduciary standards. What's unusual about that?"

HA!!! If so, then that's an example of how good they are at pulling the wool over your eyes. If they can deceive you, then also deceiving the failed government just happens by default. They're not doing anything to work with anyone. All they care about is that the new DOL Fiduciary Rules won't affect them at all. That's the main goal they're trying to accomplish. And they'll probably succeed too.

In this case, they're just pointing to a sign that says, "Nothing to see here, move along," and hoping that the DOL reads it and thinks, "I don't know squat about financial plans, let alone the difference between a low-quality and a high-quality financial plan. C'mon, I'm just a government employee with zero financial skills, education, and experience! MGP is bold enough to put a big thing on their website boasting that their software makes quality financial plans. I guess it must be true, so I'll just move along and look for something else to whine about elsewhere."

They think the government is so stupid, that they'll just read the sign and move on. They may be right, as this is what always happens when they try to stop Wall Street shenanigans. Wall street just outthinks, outguns, and outspends them, and thus gets whatever they want, most every time.

Critiquing their text: No MGP cannot help, it can only hurt. There's not one thing that MGP does that a true fiduciary would approve of. What's the source of this "recent survey?" C'mon, it's MGP, there's no survey. They just made it up, it's just a fake falsehood deception, just like everything else they do.

Then they left out by far the #1 obstacle to "creating a financial plan" in the Real World in their pie chart. Creating an actual financial plan is hard work, and advisers (especially BD Reps) just do not perform any kind of hard work anymore, period. Since the beginning of time, they've just gotten used to the fact that any and all deceptions can be used to move life insurance company products, using minimum work and maximum shenanigans, regardless how Black Hat they are; and everyone thinks it's just fine. Well, those days are slowly coming to an end, with the new DOL Fiduciary rules being hopefully the first step.

That's THE problem in the industry since '05 or so. If there's any actual work / time / thinking / attention span / skills or education required, or reality involved, or any "knowing what you're doing;" then the average financial adviser will just say no.

Why? Because they don't have to. Why work when you don't have to? Nobody is forcing them to perform actual work. Nobody has in the past, nobody is now, and more than likely, nobody will ever force financial planners to actually be financial planners in the future.

These days financial advisers are too dumb, broke and broken, sleep-deprived, confused, lazy, technically challenged, and incompetent with near-zero attention spans, to create a financial plan - even a non-quality financial plan.

BD Reps demand goalware that will allow them to make commissions while performing the bare minimum of work, while making it look like they actually did some work to clients. This is what MGP specializes in - the great "Quality Financial Plan Deception."

Nobody does it better, and it's just the end result of letting all of these massive government failures fester since the beginning of time. All of this is just as simple and easy to understand as that.

THE PROBLEM, is when a financial adviser "makes a financial plan" for a non-retired client, it doesn't have accurate numbers.

A financial plan created via goalware is not a financial plan. The word "plan" is in the string "financial planning software" because its accurate numbers track reality enough to allow one to make realistic plans for the future - as a human in the 21^st century here on Earth - not on BizarroWorld.

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