An Overall Product Classification, Generic Review, Evaluation of Their Functions, and Detailed Comparisons with Tools For Money
(see the chart at the bottom)

We're trying to do a fair and balanced review, so if you dispute any of this, just send an e-mail and we'll look at it and if you're right, then we'll edit that and give you a freebie to thank you

If you're a consumer or investor evaluating your financial advisor's plan, then click on these links to go to the reasons why the "government" should just ban goals-based software:

1: Cloud-based

2: Inadequate risk tolerance tools

3: Little-to-no actual beef in their reports

4: Not cash flow-based (goal-focused should be Finra banned)

5: Unsuitable (Target) investment portfolio recommendations (sometimes only four asset classes)

6: Fake Monte Carlo simulations with no data behind it

7: Has the dumbest and most dangerous portfolio optimizer in the biz (and then that's combined with misleading "comfort zones")

8: Sets an example for Reps that's it's fine to "cheat" and cut as many corners as possible just to make a commission

9: Erroneous Social Security solver

10: Reports show fake needs just to get people to buy more today

11: Advocates the Rep doing as little actual work as possible, showing fake results, just to keep it simple stupid and gather those assets

12: Uses only one wrong method to model investment risk. Advocates putting all of your money into cash AFTER the markets crash

13: Paints a fake picture of investors' needs just to get them to make the Rep a sale

14: Their reports say they'll be fine if they would invest $X, which is incorrect

15: Their Monte Carlo simulator is fake and erroneously uses dangerously old risk data (market standard deviations)

16: Life, disability, and long-term care insurance needs are not even calculated, they're just fake numbers the Rep manually inputs into the plan

17: Ignoring cash flow surpluses and deficits tricks investors into thinking they have to invest much more now than they really do

19: The bottom line of their financial plans show people having several times as much money in the proposed scenario than they actually will, which will make them run out of money before they die (AKA superannuitization). MoneyGuidePro is basically financial poison to investors

20: Shows estate planning needs when there are none

MoneyGuidePro Review, Evaluation, and Comparison

Generic Description: Integrated and comprehensive financial planning software.

Market: Mostly BD Reps.

Review Date: This review is currently being refreshed, check back a few days into April '14.

Other Names or Sites They Go By: PIEtech.

What Module on Tools For Money it Competes With, and is the Best to Compare To: Integrated Financial Planner.

Platform: Code-driven in the clouds, but they don't say what language. Not ISO / IEC 27001:2005 cloud security certified.

Read why you should not be working in the clouds when it comes to financial planning software.

Read why Excel-based financial plan software is superior to code-driven software.

Price: $1,300 to over $2,000 if you tack on all of their bells and whistles.

For $1,000 you can buy everything on this site, which provides much more value than just financial planning software.

Annual Update Prices: 100%, so you pay full price every year.

Tools For Money is only 50%.

Finra Reviewed: No, because it has a Monte Carlo simulator.

Monte Carlo Simulator: Yes.

Buying Caveats: None found so far (other than it being cloud-based).

Printing: Typical code-based platform where you click print, and it spits out pre-programmed reports in PDF format that cannot be altered by the user (unless you have a PDF editor).

With all Tools For Money software, you have total control over all printing.

Delivery Methods: 100% cloud-based, so all that's delivered are passwords.

With all Tools For Money software, programs are e-mailed after ordering (after that, you'll never have to go online or need an Internet connection for anything).

Number of Computers the Program Will Run On: Only one advisor and one assistant can use it, unless you buy their multiple-user deal for much more money.

With all Tools For Money software, you can also use anything for anything on an unlimited numbers of computers.

Integration and/or Online Downloading: The best integration with other programs and ability to download custodian investment data.

MoneyGuidePro Comparison Conclusions

They say they're, "The originator and leader in Goal-focused planning." This is AKA as being "goal-based."

If so, then they're the first to get everything about creating "quality" financial plans "wrong," and start the fad of having financial plan software that's incapable of correctly calculating numbers, therefore making all future projections meaningless. This is why it doesn't even produce projected cash flow or net worth reports, only current snapshots.

The one and only correct methodology to use if you care at all about accurately projecting financial futures, is being "cash flow-based" (or using their words, cash flow-focused), which is what the IFP is all about. After doing these reviews, it's clear that the IFP and NaviPlan are the only financial plan software programs that are capable of accurately forecasting peoples' financial lives far into the future.

Then they say it has, "Detailed Cash Flow for Retirement Distribution." This is impossible, because you can either be cash flow-focused or goal-focused over all time frames. You can't have both, because they're mutually exclusive (it's like saying you can drive forward and reverse at the same time, or having your cake and eating it too).

So what they're doing is being goal-focused before retirement and then cash flow-focused during retirement. The enormous malfunction with that, is the whole plan is so far from reality in the year retirement starts, that even if you properly accounted for every penny during retirement, the plan fails miserably if and when compared to life in the Real World. For example all of their sample plans show the Boomers retiring with enough money, when in reality, they have less than half of what's actually needed.

Over the years, clients that have had financial plans made via the MoneyGuidePro will be saying, "Our reality five years from getting this financial plan Done is so far from what it forecasted that it's a total joke. And how's our American Funds, Annuities, and ETFs doing? Not too well. Not only that, we never heard from him again after selling those to us, then when we called BD Financial Services they said he doesn't even work there anymore. Now they keep calling us wanting to send out a Rep that just got her securities and licenses last week. Enough! We need to find and hire a real financial planner, maybe they know how to buy and use real software that will tell us what's going on and what to do!"

Over the years, clients that have had plans made via the IFP will be saying, "That planner did a good job. Look how close reality matched their plan made five years ago. Not only that, the portfolio of no-load mutual funds we invested in are doing okay. We should hire them to update this for us."

This amusing parody made me laugh, which is half the battle. If this wasn't the sad reality we have to endure, even in the 21^stcentury, all of this "stuff" would be hilarious!

They say in their disclaimers, "All results use simplifying assumptions that do not completely or accurately reflect your specific circumstances." This is a true statement.

This is true too, "This Report provides a snapshot of your current financial position and can help you to focus on your financial resources and goals, and to create a plan of action." Always keep this in mind - they even say it only produces current snapshots. But then it goes off and makes retirement planning, insurance needs, and estate planning projections. So they even say the results of everything in their software's reports that have anything to do with any time frame more than a year from now, are just made up out of thin air. So they're been having their cake and eating it to all this time, at your expense. Always read the fine print before buying something!

Then they say, "That is why MoneyGuidePro is the industry leader in innovation and has been recognized as the leading financial planning software by users - just like you." Yeah, they're the industry leader in knowing that you don't have the background, education, time, attention span, or tenacity to do a proper evaluation on how financial plan software actually works. So you have no idea that it fails to perform the #1 thing clients are paying you for - to create financial plans that accurately forecast their lives.

So to solve that problem, we're doing all of this tedious work for here on this page. Then, if you have more than a few brain cells you'll see that the only thing they're the leader in, other than sales, is being able to seduce you into being part of their bandwagon with all of the industry's best marketing gimmicks.

MoneyGuidePro is 100% web-based, which means it's "in the clouds." Read why you should not be working in the clouds when it comes to financial planning software. This is reason #1 why Finra should immediately ban it (and all cloud-based systems that are not ISO / IEC 27001:2005 cloud security certified).

I played with their free stuff, and it's sloooooooow, just as expected. So this wastes a lot of time. So all of the "time you save" by having everything dumbed down to make it "easy to use" is then all unsaved by having to wait for the Internet to load pages every time you click on something.

Not only that (the high security risk of having sensitive and private client data on someone else's computers), their servers do go down, you could lose Internet access for many reasons right when you're down to the wire of making a plan, there could be a blockage in the "hops" between the many Internet traffic routers between your computer and their servers, there could be a natural disaster of all kinds that could take their servers offline for weeks, if you don't renew or update you've lost all of your clients' inputted data forever (and you have no way to back it up on your computer), if they get more popular than if everyone was online making plans at the same time then it could slow down to a crawl - making a simple ten-minute plan take hours.

Not being cloud-based, you're never going to see this with us, or be stranded when you can't get online to work in the clouds: "IMPORTANT: MoneyGuidePro will be down from 7:00 PM ET Friday, November 16th until 8:00 AM ET Monday, November 19th for maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

The list of malfunctions and ways the cloud could literally ruin your practice overnight is just in its infancy. As more time goes by, the more hackers seeking access to your clients' personal information and money will find ways to take you down. Then you'll see that keeping everything safe, secure, 100% private, backed up, and always accessible as long as you have electricity to power your PC is by far the best way to go.

Just wait until they have a "security breach," and all of your client's financial lives are posted on the Internet for the whole world to see, and/or they start being able to make trades in your clients' accounts, and/or transfer your clients' money into their accounts. Then you'll get it, but then it will be too late. It's not a question of how, it's only a matter of when and how bad it will be. Your E&O insurance does not cover any of this liability.

MoneyGuidePro has the best integration with other vendors and can download data from CRM and custodians. For example, when you input investment assets, it will populate primitive asset allocation weights, and the usual things, from Morningstar. This probably isn't free, and would only work if you also are paying Morningstar the $700 per year per each database (you'd need to call them to find out what the deal is as it's not on their website). So you'd need to buy both the mutual fund and stock database to do what he's showing in their demo. So that's an extra $1,500 per year in addition to the cost of MoneyGuidePro. This is a great feature, if it's actually free to the end user.

Reports are in PDF, so you can't do anything with them. You can use fancy PDF editing software, but that's so many times the work as using Excel that it's a joke (them saying that it's easy, simple, and fast). It's easy, simple, and fast to print reports, but there's little-too-no beef and then you can't do anything with them. So you can only manipulate reports to look well printed by reinventing the printing wheel (so you're better off just using Excel directly so you can skip all of those steps needed to reinvent the wheel).

They have online videos instead of directions. What Directions they do have are not much, so get used to calling support for most all basic help questions.

Then they brag about being able to talk with a support Rep 82% of the time. So this means that about one out of 4.2 times you call for support, you won't get it. I think that's lame considering they're the leader with "unlimited resources." It's more like 95% over here. Plus, you'll rarely if ever need to call in the first place, because all of the directions are so thorough and clearly explained. So people having to call in for support all of the time is a tip-off that there's either a lot of things that are not understandable, there's tons of bugs, or both. So all of the time you "saved" because it's "easy to use" is going to unsaved because you'll have to spend a lot of time getting help and support for even the most basic things (that their "directions" should have, but don't).

In contrast,EVERYTHING is covered in great detail in our program's directions. Then you can print it out, so you can read it while not having to change screens, so it helps in not losing your train of thought. You can also use control-F to find what you're looking for because it's just a Word docx. This is by far the best way to do these things.

They say their allocations are "correct" when, in their tutorial, they didn't even do a risk tolerance evaluation. Their investment fact finder is woefully inadequate. Then there is no such things as a "correct" allocation. EVERYTHING in this business is just a huge guess. So this is reason #2 why Finra should put them on the "Do Not Use list"

In their "Dog & Pony Show," risk tolerance is calculated just by moving a slider, so that's very bad and basically just ignored trying to gauge an investor's feelings about investment risk. It's well done if you fall for how slick their slider is, but that performs a disservice to investors because there's little-to-no data behind making the slider move.

Here's what their fine print says about their BD approved investment risk tolerance calculator, "The MoneyGuidePro Risk Assessment highlights some � but not all � of the trade-offs youmight consider when deciding how to invest your money. This approach does not provide a comprehensive, psychometrically-based, or scientifically-validated profile of your risktolerance, loss tolerance, or risk capacity, and is provided for informational purposes only. Based on your specific circumstances, you must decide the appropriate balance betweenpotential risks and potential returns. MoneyGuidePro does not and cannot adequatelyunderstand or assess the appropriate risk/return balance for you. MoneyGuidePro requiresyou to select a risk score. Once selected, three important pieces of information are available to help you determine the appropriateness of your score: a cash-bond-stock portfolio, the impact of a Bear Market Loss (either the Great Recession or the Bond Bear Market, whichever is lower) on this portfolio, and a graph showing how your score compares to the risk score of others in your age group. MoneyGuidePro uses your risk score to select a risk-based portfolio on the Target Band page. This risk-based portfolio selection is provided for informational purposes only, and you should consider it to be a starting point for conversations with your advisor. It is your responsibility to select the Target Portfolio you want MoneyGuidePro to use. The selection of your Target Portfolio, and other investment decisions, should be made by you, after discussions with your advisor and, if needed, other financial and/or legal professionals."

What percentage of Reps have told their clients that the financial plan software they use requires the client to tell the Rep what their risk tolerance is? What percentage of Reps have had any input on how their Target Band portfolio was constructed? Your average BD Rep doesn't know how to Do any of this properly, because their idea of an efficient investment portfolio is usually just randomly slapping a few American Funds together. What percentage of Reps have even read this fine print, let alone understand what any of this means? Probably less than 1%.

Then their "risk-based portfolio on the Target Band page" is as feckless, generic, and dangerous as it can get, because it uses the lamest (probably just three) asset class-level portfolio optimizer I've ever seen.

The result page "Actions to Consider Now :" page is just a cheap imitation of our Source and Applications of Funds section of the Asset Allocator sheet.

The bottom lines about everything the narrator has done up to 16 minutes into their demo is that you could have done the same things, and gotten much more accurate Numbers, by just using Single RWR (which costs a whole $100).

Not only that, it would have taken half the time too, and that's not even accounting for Internet delays. Not only that, there would have no deceptive sales practices and there's a bazillion times more meaningful and accurate information displayed.

At least MoneyGuidePro allows the user to select the correct way of calculating taxes. They have an option for the program work like ours - by using an average overall rate.

In Jan '13, tax rates changed. With all of the financial planning software on this site, you could have made the update to the new rates with one input. With most all other vendors, like MasterPlan and most of the MoneyWhatevers, you'll have to wait weeks, if not months, for them to update their code. Then hope that it's correctly done and then deal with all of the bugs, delays, and subsequent bug fix patch updates caused by that.

The only major vendors that allow you to bypass this waiting is MoneyGuidePro and NaviPlan (which costs $2,100 per year and requires a two-year contract commitment). So even though you can bypass it, you're still going to have to wait for them to update their code to the new rates if you're buying it mostly because it estimates taxes in the first year (which is what users most always say).

Then as you can read here, if you've been using other vendors' software, everything you've done in the past regarding tax, cash flow, and retirement projections is now wrong, and needs to be redone. So unless you can get your clients to pay you again for enduring this annoyance, you're stuck working more for free, just because you like and think you need financial plan software to perform this function.

Then, most of these vendors are barely surviving as it is. So they'll have to spend resources paying their uber-expensive code programmers overtime to update their code. The problem with that is they're not happy campers in this environment, and think they're underpaid as it is. Now because they're probably on salary, and don't get overtime pay, this makes them even more unhappy because they're working much harder, longer, and faster for free too. Unhappy tech campers tend to bail and move on to industries with much greener pastures. So that drains non-existent resources from everything else, causes a whole chain of event problems, which is never any good in any way for you. So look for them to be significantly raising their prices after their next few rounds of "updates," because this is the only way they can pass the buck onto you to keep their deals profitable.

Their menus and help screens and directions on the left- and right-hand sides are great and you can click on them to read while you're on the section you're working on. This is good if you like that, but you can only read about the topic relevant to the current page you're on. I just think using a hard copy print out from a Word doc is much better and "easier to use." This is because you can find and look stuff up without having to stop what you're doing and "change screens" all the time. Also if you're reading the directions in Word, then you can just Control-F to find what you want, while staying on the same input screen, thus not mentally losing your place and then fumbling to get back to where you were (waiting for the Internet to load pages every time you click too).

Then if you don't click "Done" after doing everything, Nothing happens. This is the opposite of working in Excel, where you input data, press enter and it saved. So if you forget to click Done all the time, then you're going to go off thinking things you input were accounted for, when they're not. On 19:28 on their video: "After you've made adjustments, be sure you click Done. When you're working with MoneyGuidePro, unless you click Done your work will not be saved. So always look for a Done button and make sure you click it once you've made your changes. If you use that back button or click cancel; again your changes will not be saved." So the way all of this works is prone to serious errors that you'll have to spend time chasing your tail to fix. So this helps make it not simple, fast, uncomplicated, and not easy to use.

Their rotating goal selection wheel is very slick for a code-based program. The pretty picture wheel rotates until the goal you want to tinker with shows at the bottom. Then you can select it, it opens up a new screen, and you can tinker with it.

But in Excel, this isn't there, because it's not needed. All of their goals are there all the time and are much easier to work with because you just edit those cells directly (without having to first hunt for it, then select it, waiting for the Internet after every click). So this is another area where MoneyGuidePro is not easier to use. It's only a few more clicks to do the same things in MoneyGuidePro, but if your Internet connection isn't fast, or their servers are slow, this could significantly slow you down.

Stock option and restricted stocks: This is something people cared about in the mid- to late-90's, but most of that died out long ago. I started making a fuss about making the best one, then it became clear that Nobody cared, so it was abandoned (you can see this lame almost non-functional stock market calculator the TVM Financial Tools demo).

So remembering how hard that was to make work correctly leads me to type that if you or I did the math on theirs, it probably wouldn't work right either. But it might, and I don't care, because it's a mostly-useless feature that few people care about anymore (because stock options stopped being the cool fad back in the last century). Who gets rewarded by being a good employee with lucrative stock options anymore? Few if anyone, and I haven't heard a peep from anyone requesting that function since '03.

So if you like and can get some use from this, then you can either buy this and hope that it actually does someone of value (I couldn't find anything), use NaviPlan (which probably has had sufficient resources put into that module to make it work right), or search for stock option software from inexpensive vendors that have concentrated only on that niche market, and thus worked out all of the bugs and are up on current with laws. Also why I abandoned it was because other people already are doing that, and not making money at it - just like all of the tax software vendors that went under trying to compete with TurboTax (and Leimberg's Number Cruncher for estate planning).

Their net worth feature appears to only give a current snapshot, and does little-to-nothing to account for everything needed to project correctly into the future. If so, then you can make a better report than theirs in a few minutes using Excel and/or Word.

About their investment / asset allocation module: When you input an asset, you enter a current dollar value. Then you input the percentages of up to 11 asset classes the account is comprised of. This is okay, other than the limited asset classes. Then the report gives a current and/or proposed pie chart comprised of 11 asset classes (and you can only change the name of one). Their proposed portfolio builder is called "Target Band," and all this is are pre-set models using four asset classes (then there's little-to-no Directions saying if they set them up, and they can't be changed, or the user Does and they can be changed). So really, it doesn't even have a rudimentary asset allocation or investment planning module. So you'll need to buy additional software to do that for just a few to several hundred more bucks.

Bug: On the Summary page, if you click on any of the Details or More links, it just goes back to the Start / Personal input page. There's Nothing there, so that's a malfunction.

About their Play Zone and What If Worksheet: Other than it being incapable of calculating numbers correctly, this is slick for a code-driven program because it's all on one place. Then Play Zone took slickness to the extreme by making inputting numbers work via sliders. But you can do ALL of this with the IFP, so there's Nothing here that can't be done, WITH being able to project scenarios into the future correctly and accurately too.

What we call "inputted life expectancy" they call "Planning Age." So there's nothing new, different, or better going on there.

I didn't even see a college planning module at all. So if there is one, then it's probably no better than using a free online college calculator.

Comments, Opinions, and Observations

MGP is for financial flunkies with Adult Attention Span Deficit Disorder (ADHD). They're not really professional financial advisors, because an actual adviser would never use software that's this out of touch with reality. So it's only for "product peddlers" that want to make a quick commission by telling people what they want to hear, instead of the reality they Need to hear.

Most of this section was based from their tutorial video (that can be seen here until they change it:
(https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/Videos/Swf/TrialUserOverview/TrialUserOverview.htm)

Their claim, "We believe that every investor needs and deserves a high quality financial plan" can't be true because most all of projected their numbers are just wrong. It's not possible to create a "quality" financial plan when the very heart of financial planning is mostly ignored (detailed budgeting and cash flow including accounting for replacements, and annual pre-retirement cash flow surpluses and deficits).

Then they say, "A friendly and meaningful goalbased plan that meets the needs of all types of clients..." The only need it meets, are the needs of the dummy advisor, because it allows them to make more money because it's easier and saves time. Being "friendly" and working correctly are mutually exclusive in financial software. To have things work correctly, you have to be able to control things. Being able to control things requires having controls (input fields). Then having controls makes it less "easy to use." So you can either have "easy to use" or you can have software that actually performs the functions you're paying for (and what clients are paying you for). You can't have both.

Then they call it "SMARTware" when it's not "smart" at all. They can afford to hire the best marketing people in the biz that can think up all of these cool gimmicks like SMARTware though. So they're by far the best at pleasing Rep-friendly sales fluff.

How can you be smart when you can't even calculate basic numbers correctly? It can't do that because it ignores pre-retirement annual cash flow surpluses and deficits and replacement costs (in addition to a lot of other critical things). All it does is take current snapshots, and then it ignores most everything needed to properly project everything into the future. Then it makes long-term retirement plan projections based off those numbers that aren't even close to being in the ballpark. You can Do most of that work by using the dumbest free online financial calculators.

What's smart about it is that it works well in the clouds, then they're smart enough to know about the mental state of the typical "dummy advisor" and therefore rubs all their buttons the right way, making for an easy seduction leading to an easy sale. Like the old saying goes, "The easiest people to sell to are salespeople!"

So it's smart when it comes to it actually being able to function in the clouds, integration with other programs, seducing Reps into buying it, making it slick to look at, saving the Rep time, and being easy to use. But it's dumber than a brick when it comes to making quality financial plans. So all of these things combined are why Finra should ban it.

But the way the world still works is mostly a lose-lose proposition for everyone involved. Nobody wins but the software vendors in the "approval cartel / cabal," and the product packagers & marketers (life insurance companies and ETFs and American Funds). Definitely not the Reps, the Broker Dealers, Nor their clients. If this was not true, then commission-based Reps, BDs, and investors would all be thriving. Instead it's just been one long implosion, crash, going under, and/or bare survival for both the BD business model, their Reps, and the life insurance companies too. Clients of BD Reps aren't doing much better in the 21^st century either. Merrill Lynch even had to be bought out by BofA, and a few years later, they're probably thinking they'd been better off letting them go under.

When I got to this review, I was hoping that finally, there would be a financial software suite that would give me little-to-no reason to whine profusely, when looking at how well plans and investment portfolios made from it would perform for clients in the Real World a few years into the future. That would restore my faith in humanity just a tad.

Compared to all of the other vendors in this space, they have "unlimited resources" to spend on anything they want to. So they just have to be doing so much correctly that it would make all of our software, and all of the other vendors, look like a total lame joke.

But noooooooooo, this so far is the most insidious, dangerous, totally WRONG way of doing most everything that I've ever seen in my millions of hours at this. I was dumbfounded when looking at their online sample financial plan. It's only 18 pages, and there's little-to-nothing there (and their 217 page plan only has a dozen or so good pages with actual beef).

At first I thought that all of these slick tachometers were just the tip of a cool innovative iceberg, and that there was a whole fully-functional underlying powerful engine for precisely calculating numbers. But nooooooooooooooo!

That's all there is to it. It's just a bunch of rudimentary financial calculators that work together with slick-looking outputs, which have a rudimentary portfolio optimizer tied into a mostly-useless Monte Carlo simulator! That's all there is, hardly any engine at all.

So far, only NaviPlan and our IFP has "real financial planning software." So the only vendor other than us that has software that "restores any faith in the system" comes from a vendor that "goes under" every decade or so, then has to be rescued by the same life insurance industry that's responsible for making it not prosper in the first place.

So MoneyGuidePro can be summed up by saying, "The Emperor has no clothes!" There's about 10% of the functionality there that I expected from the #1 vendor, then it doesn't even account for much, which means the engine has little-to-nothing to chew on, so therefore it's totally useless when it comes to accurately forecasting futures. If there was sufficient data to chew on, then the Monte Carlo simulation would take hours to complete 10,000 iterations. It only take a minute because it's not actually calculating anything. For example, the IFP only runs 255 iterations, and it could take over ten minutes. If it performed 10,000 it would take days to complete.

But wait, you're not going to believe this one: You have to read their fine print to see that even though they say everywhere that it iterates 10,000 times, it does not! In their fine print disclaimer it says, "MoneyGuidePro uses a specialized methodology called Beyond Monte Carlo�, a statistical analysis technique that provides results that are as accurate as traditional Monte Carlo simulations with 10,000 trials, but with fewer iterations and greater consistency. Beyond Monte Carlo� is based on Sensitivity Simulations, which re-runs the Plan only 50 to 100 times using small changes in the return. This allows a sensitivity of the results to be calculated, which, when analyzed with the mean return and standard deviation of the portfolio, allows the Probability of Success for your Plan to be directly calculated."

This is an outright deception. In big print everywhere it says it performs 10,000 iterations, then in the fine print it says it only performs around 75 iterations. So our Monte Carlo simulator performs around three times as many (254). So faith in humanity not restored, just the opposite. And Finra is totally fine with all of this!

So if you've bought MoneyGuidePro, then you're the perfect example of a "dummy advisor" for not doing even basic homework when shopping for financial planning software, falling for their slick marketing, then using it make reports that should not even be allowed to be called financial plans. You bought it because of the industry's best marketing, everyone else buys it, it's "BD approved," it has slick tachometers, it works in the clouds, it's simple and easy to use, and it helps you make short-term commission-based transactions so you can meet your BD's sales quotas.

It even makes MoneyTree look like the correct way to do things, and that's performing such a major disservice to investors that it's a total joke. I can see why BDs approve of letting Reps use MoneyTree because it's just a very dumbed-down and incorrect way for dummy financial advisers to do things, but it's not dangerous, and not even close to insidious. But MoneyGuidePro should just be banned by Finra immediately because most all of their numbers past one-year are "fake."

Most of this section was based from their tutorial video (that can be seen here until they change it: (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/Videos/Swf/TrialUserOverview/TrialUserOverview.htm)

First a minor annoyance. The first thing the narrator, Tom Roberts, says in his demo video is, "...I want to welcome you guys today...." He knows this is a "man's business" alright! It's mostly men doing this, but there's enough women enduring the proverbial slings and arrows these days, that even I wouldn't dare say this.

It's "Goal-focused," which means it doesn't even try to calculate numbers correctly. The only way to do things "right" is to be 100% cash flow-based.

This guy's slicks sales pitch is doing an awesome job at seducing you (with his smooth and disarming southern accent), but it's your clients' that are the ones getting screwed. Their sample allocation in their Dog & Pony Show demo is a total joke compared to MoneyTree, and MoneyTree's asset allocation is a total joke compared to our systems (and for building your Dog & Pony Show).

Their "Target portfolios" in their Dog & Pony Show only use four asset classes. Then it's picking one based on doing little-to-no investor risk tolerance evaluation.

Then it shows a portfolio optimization efficient frontier, making you believe that it's actually Doing something of value, when the exact opposite is true. Read why all of that is not only total nonsense, but is just dangerous and going to get you into trouble. If you click the link above and learn about how optimizers really work, then note all of the perils inherent in the way MoneyGuidePro works. It uses "pretend optimization" (asset class level) and not even real optimization (asset level). Then most of the time it only optimizes with four generic asset classes. And then MGP doesn't even do an adequate job of determine investor risk tolerance.

So it's a perfect example of a worst case nightmare scenario hatching a huge chicken that's going to be constantly sitting outside your door wanting to come home to roost. This is reason #4 why Finra should ban it for use by Reps selling to individual investors. Most everything about the way it does most everything is just completely wrong, and performs the biggest disservice to investors of any software out there.

Reason #5 why Finra should put MGP on the Do Not Use list is because it's telling people in their Dog & Pony Show that their mostly non-existent risk tolerance result matches a mostly non-existent investment portfolio. So both of the most critical things in managing money for clients was just made up out of thin air. Then to top it off, the recommended portfolio was created by the stupidest asset class-level portfolio optimizer I've ever seen (even the best asset-level ones are so dangerous that any client with half a brain should be running for the hills at its very mention).

But they won't because it's all so new and seductive and popular that it just has to be awesome. So just like MoneyTree, MoneyGuidePro is the "Paris Hilton of financial planning software" squared (twice as much as Money Tree). It's famous just because it looks good, is easy for dummies to use, and everyone agrees that it's famous.

Reason #6 why Finra should ban it is because it's telling people that the probability of success of a plan is based on a Monte Carlo simulation WITH INSUFFICIENT DATA BEHIND IT. If you follow their movie demo (Dog & Pony Show), then you'll see that the guy only input about 5% of the data needed to even run a rudimentary simulation.

So what they did was just combine all of the modern technological bells and whistles that are able to go into financial software these days, to seduce everyone. They make it all seamless, pretty, and easy to use, and all of this makes you think you're just fine. IT makes you think everything is fine, because the output looks so cool, "Wow is this slick or what? They really did a super job at this. Of course everything in the program works just as great as their slick tachometers, I'm sure my BD and Finra both looked this over well before then approved of it. So their code and all of its functions just have to work as brilliantly as everything else, right!?"

Wrong! MGP just put all of their resources into making it look super cool, then the actual hard work of crunching numbers wasn't even done at all. BDs approve of it only because they approve of Reps cutting as many corners as possible to make the quickest and easiest sales. Finra didn't approve of it, and is just "too lame" to take the heat of putting investors first, which is their primary function. So they just decline to put it on the Do Not Use list because it's the path of least resistance and they don't have the resources to actually take a stand start a battle with its "members" that all want to use it because it's the best way to legally deceive investors into investing money today.

The reality is that even individually, each of these bells and whistles are just so dangerous to use that Finra should ban them altogether (yes, in my stupid little opinion, I think Finra should ban both portfolio optimizers and Monte Carlo simulators when advisors are doing work at the individual-client level).

Then when you make them all play with each other, all that Does is compound all of their fatal flaws by a factor of a bazillion. This is like playing Russian roulette with a gun where there's a bullet in all of the chambers but one. One bullet would be Monte Carlo, one would be the portfolio optimizer, and then a few more would have reproduced from marrying the two together.

They're basically just preying on the fact that they know the average financial planner is way too dumb to know any of this. Not only that, but they definitely have no time or attention span to the boring tedious work to figure out why all of this is just so wrong.

What I'm ranting about now is their "SuperSolve" function. They should call it the "Super Totally Wrong and Dangerous Way to Plan and Invest Clients' Money In The Real World" function instead.

So it may seem like it's working great, but the bottom line long-term results of any plan or investment portfolio created by this farce will be so detrimental to clients' lives in the Real World that it's just not believable that Finra would allow it. So the famous oxymoron of "government intelligence" is what's at work here! The top people at Finra are only a little brighter than a smart financial planner, so they also have no clue about how so very wrong this whole way of Doing things is.

I guess it takes being a CFA Charterholder to see what a total time bomb this whole way of doing things is, but I could have spotted ALL of these fatal flaws before passing Level I (I had over 1,000 hours into using the best asset-level portfolio optimizer full-time to invest dozens of millions of client funds in the Real World before even passing Level I). So I saw firsthand how dangerous these programs are, even when you both use the best programs, and are one of the world's leading experts at it.

This is the first time I've ever seen (other than stock picking and/or market timing) anything that's WORSE THAN JUST RANDOMLY THROWING DARTS AT A FEW AMERICAN FUNDS! That's not true, what's worse are all forms of annuities.

I've been whining for over a two decades about how much of a disservice to clients it is that the dumbest "financial planners" can get away with putting tons of client money randomly into just a few American Funds, and I thought I'd never ever see anything worse than that. This way of doing things (not doing anything to determine investor risk tolerance, and then using an asset class level optimizer with just a few generic asset classes and then running Monte Carlo simulations on the results) is even worse than that, worse than market timing with ETFS, and even worse than all forms of annuities!

How Finra can let them get away with this is totally beyond me. So this is reason #7 of why it should be banned and shows how totally and hopelessly broken the whole primitive and pathetic financial services industry still is.

Then it closes the seduction with their tachometer image showing that if you take the advice of the dumbest-downed portfolio optimizer ever invented, that your plan will be in the "green comfort zone." This is unbelievable that financial advisors would fall for this, and is doing the worst job of recommending a client portfolio that I've ever seen. This is reason #7 why Finra should immediately ban it. There's no such thing as a "comfort zone" in the optimization world, never has been, and never will be. So everything to Do with "comfort zones" should just be Finra banned.

Then it took the guy on the video more than twice as long as it would take to make such a simple retirement plan using RWR.

Then their whole deal where the moving of the risk tolerance slider shows how much money they would have lost "during the Great Recession" is just soooo wrong that I could go on for years about it. Reason #8 why Finra should ban goals-based software.

The graphics are what's selling this. It's just so cool and pretty that it's seductive. So you're not thinking about how retarded this whole calculation actually engine is, you're thinking about how cool it looks and how easy it is to use, and how impressed your prospects and clients will be.

Then they say all of this is not "dumbing it down, but smartening it up," but this is just the industry's best (paid) people's best work ever at marketing hype. This is ALL about being as dumb as you can get! And it's all just so wrong that it's not believable (that they're the #1 vendor in this space). So they dumbed everything Down as much as possible for the average BD Rep to use, and then just slapped a marketing slogan onto it that says the opposite of what's actually true. So you're supposed to just read their slogan and think the opposite of what's true - because yes, you are really that stupid, and they know it and don't care (you bought and are using it right, well thereyago, huh?).

Considering this is the #1 vendor, this is the most dumbed Down financial plan software on the market (even worse than MoneyTree Easy Money). It's so bad that there should be a whole new software category invented, because it's Not even actually financial planning software. MoneyGuidePro and Easy Money both should be in this category, because financial planning software is about forecasting people's financial futures with the most accuracy possible, so people can make rational decisions about all of the critical events and choices in their lives.

Both of these programs do not even perform this basic function. So it shouldn't be allowed to be called financial planning software. Then the long-term results of the IFP should be used to make a plan, then the same input should be inputted into "goal-based" software. Then if the long-term projections are off by more than 10%, compared to the IFP, then Finra should just completely ban it. This is because being off by more than 10% in retirement planning is the difference between eating and not after a decade of being retired (so then it's back to saying, "paper or plastic" ya go during your "Golden Years").

If it was a minor vendor, like Torrid, then there wouldn't be much to whine about. But this is the #1 vendor, so you'd think it would be a lot smarter - especially since they brag about it being so smart. It's smart at making things easy for the planner, and selling to salespeople, but it's applicability to the Real World is a total joke.

So if you're falling for that, then you're the dummy here (more like sheeple). You're stupid for Not doing enough homework on your financial planning software purchase if you're buying into their hype. You've been seduced by a big firm that has the resources to completely make you let down your smart shopping guard, so you're just hypnotized immediately and then are open to falling for all of their sales slickness. You're dumb because this is NOT making your life better because it's "easy to use." Also, it's not "saving you time" because of the Internet delays. And it's definitely not doing a good service for your clients (because it's so dumb that it's such a blunt tool that the chances of it accurate forecasting financial futures is so small that it's a total joke).

One way their Super Solver works makes it quick and easy to run another Monte Carlo simulation based on retiring later, or other things that you have to do when you don't have enough money to invest. It does it all automatically, which make it easy. With ours, you'd have to run a simulation, see it fail, then manually do things like increase the retirement age, then run it again. Then if that didn't work, repeat until it does.

Super Solve does all of this automatically, so it's very easy. But like they say, no pain no gain. So it's very seductive to just lay back and let their cloud do the hard work. But as the rants above point out, this is all based on totally incorrect ways of doing things (and only ~75 Monte Carlo iterations, not 10,000). So as you're being seduced, a thief is stealing the wallet out of your pants (or more to the point, your clients' pants).

You need to do all of this hard work as a financial advisor because, THAT'S WHAT CLIENTS' ARE PAYING YOU FOR! So I hate all of this because it's seducing planners into thinking it's okay to not only cut all of the corners, but to basically just cheat your way into winning the game without even trying to play. So this is reason #8 why Finra should immediately ban it. It makes it fine for dumb planners to do dumb things for their clients, while avoiding having to do all of the hard work clients' think they're paying for.

In their "quick and dirty seduction demo" (Prospect Demo) both their "Average Return" and the "Bad Timing" returns are both 77%. The narrator just blows by this "program error" (they can't and should not be the same number, so it's probably an error).

Then after using their magic Super Solve function, their probability of success only increases by only increases to 84% from this unacceptable 77%. So not only is this an insignificant increase, telling people these numbers are correct is just a "lie" (there's no way any of this is actually going to happen using their lamest optimizer I've ever seen).

The narrator says with confidence that these numbers are Gospel, so Finra should be made aware of this so they can put them on the "Do Not Use" list. This is another example of the exact sort of shenanigans that is their raison d'�tre to eradicate from the industry. Not only are they ignoring it, by letting them get this big, they're de facto telling the world that they approve of these life-ruining deceptions. This is partially how we got to be in the mess we're in as a nation, when it comes to our "low savings rate."

Then the narrator says, "...the point is very quickly we are able to provide some meaningful information and advice about what they might be able to spend based on their current situation."

This is incorrect at so many levels that I just can't believe that nobody has pointed this out to the regulators yet (Finra). What the Narrator just demoed (at about 13 minutes into it) is so far from reality in the Real World, that there's no way it's going to even be close to the ballpark. This is like a used car salesman telling a prospect that a thirty-year-old four-cylinder SUV with 100 HP and 300,000 miles will easily carry four people, all your camping stuff, with a boat towed behind it up a steep hill at 60 MPH. The chances of any of that happening is slim to none, and Slim left town years ago. The only way they're getting away with this is either Finra doesn't know, knows but are too stupid to know how deceptive this is, or they're committed to being part of this "approval cartel / cabal," and now has no way to back out.

About their brand new feature "Social Security Maximization" solver. The narrator goes into a big dissertation about when's the best time to collect Social Security. Then it runs the usual and useless Monte Carlo simulations on them. So again and as usual, this is all so far from how the Real World works, that it's reason #9 why Finra should ban it. About how Social Security actually works in the Real World is all here.

Now I just have to whine about all programs that attempt to calculate Social Security benefits. They can't, it's as simple as that. The actuarial math on determining how much someone will actually receive in benefits is so complex that only the SSA can do it. These bogus software programs only use the current year's earnings (the user inputs only one number) to make the calculations. This is so incorrect that it shouldn't be legal. Even if it wasn't so complex, only the SSA has the lifetime of detailed earning's data needed to calculate PIAs.

So the bottom line here is that it's 100% incorrect to let financial software try to figure this out. The correct way to do it, is to just take a few minutes to go online and get the ACTUAL NUMBERS, or have clients bring in their postal mailed hard copies, then input the actual values manually. Fortunately they have a link that goes to the SSA's website, so it can be estimated. So they have a Real World solution to this problem, but again, these are only estimates. Actual numbers are too easy to get and should only be used.

Also, when you either input Social Security PIA (benefit) values that are too low, wait later than age 62 to start collecting, and/or use an "inputted life expectancy age" of less than 100 in financial plans, then you're misleading people into investing much more than they need to.

Social Security actuaries use age 100 (or more) in calculating how much PIAs are paid in total relative to contributions. So inputting a lower amount than one will actually receive and then starting it at the latest age (because of faulty logic thinking this will "increase payments") and then killing them off before age 100, is like loaning someone money and then saying you only have to pay half of it back. So every time one of these deceptions are used, it makes it look like the clients have much less resources coming into the plan than they really do, which greatly increases the need to invest much more today. Not being "cash flow-based" makes this easy, because it makes it just fine to ignore all of these years of missing incomes. This makes salespeople happy because the goal-focused financial plan makes it look like they have to invest around twice as much today to reach their goals, so they make more money like that. This is reason #10 why Finra should ban it.

Reason #11 why Finra should ban it: At 15:50, the Narrator says, "...at MoneyGuide, we've really placed a lot of focus and attention on making planning easier for the advisor." Then at 17:00 he says, "We make the assumption that we want to build the plan as quickly as possible..."

On the surface this may seem like the most awesome thing since the invention of the wheel, from a dummy commission-based BD Rep's point of view. "I need THAT!"

But this way of thinking is like a medical doctor saying, "We're not going to do any actual diagnosis on the patient because it takes too much time and we make less money like that. So we're just going to say and pretend like we're making an all-out spare-no-expense leave-no-stone-unturned effort to figure out exactly what's wrong with the patient, because that's the only way we can actually fix the problem. But in reality, all of the money spent on tests and diagnoses, we just pocket all that. No tests, no work, no exam, no Diagnosis, no thinking about what's really going on, just take all of that money they think we're spending on all that, and put it all right in our pockets. About the time, let's just say we're spending all of the time needed to think about the problems to determine an accurate prognosis, when in reality behind the scenes, we're just spending all of that time looking for more patients to get into our sales funnel. Then for our prognosis, everyone in the biz knows what the Deal is there - we're just going to sell them whichever new drug kicks back the most money to us, regardless of what the patient really needs! What we have is a factory that gets them in and gets them out as quickly as possible, and keeps our time and expenses down as much as possible, to maximize our income per hour worked. But the picture we paint to the patient is one of complete dedication, care, and professionalism. We don't care, and we know they're way too clueless to ever find out, or even suspect any of these shenanigans. What an awesome legal business model, isn't America grand! No change needed, better make more political contributions to ensure there's never any change!"

This is what MoneyGuidePro does with its software, because they know this is what the average BD Rep financial advisor wants, and it's also what most every other financial plan software vendor is doing too (e.g., MoneyTree). It's just that MoneyGuidePro has a video you can easily watch that proves all of this firsthand. Every software vendor but us and NaviPlan does pretty much the same things, but it's just easy to pick on MoneyGuidePro because the proof is right there for all to watch for free anytime.

And then when it comes time for the actual prognosis, it's the same thing for everyone. There's little-to-no actual work done here either, just recommending as much in American Funds, fixed annuities, variable annuities and whole life insurance (AKA VUL), that they'll write checks out for today.

We Advocate the EXACT OPPOSITE of this typical financial services business model, and our financial planning software works in the exact opposite way. Ours allows truth in numbers. This is the only way to accurately forecast what's going to happen in the future. So it's "more work," takes more time, and is "not as easy to use," but it allows an actual professional money doctor that actually cares about healing patients to do their jobs properly. Even if an actual professional money doctor wanted to be "good and not evil," most all other financial plan software vendors are unable to perform these basic and critical functions. This is because there's so many "errors" and flaws in the underlying methodology, that the numbers their financial plans project will be so far off compared to reality in a few years, that it's a total joke (and thus should be banned).

Ask any client if this business model is something they want, or would even tolerate, if they knew the real deal of what's going on behind the scenes. Then you'll see that if they knew their planner was using MoneyGuidePro because it "allows them to cut as many corners as possible and saves them time from having to do the actual hard planning work they're paying for," they would probably be outraged, and would fire them.

This is not what they're paying for, and thus this whole quick and dirty mode of doing business performs a huge Disservice to consumers and investors. This is the main difference between our (RIA) business model, and the BD Rep business model.

The RIA model is about being a true professional, free of most all conflicts of interest, out to perform the most accurate projections for their clients, so they'll have a profitable win-win long-term relationship. The BD Rep model is about as many short-term lose-lose transactions as the salesperson can get, all while making the most money while doing the least amount of work, and not caring much about the long-term relationship. It all boils down to the basic human condition.

Here's another difference in the way we operate. At 15:58, the Narrator says, "We wanted to give you a way where you could provide a prospect with something meaningful to help them have the desire to come back in and a longer conversation."

This is one way to do that, and apparently is the most popular because it's new, but as I've been ranting, it's full of errors, deceptions, bad Numbers, the wrong methodology of doing most everything, and is not in the best interest of clients. Just because you can do a newfangled thing, does not mean that you have to, or should.

The best tool to perform the job of getting a prospect interested enough to want to go further into the financial planning process, is to just use the ancient low-tech tried-and-true way of using sample financial plans as your Dog & Pony Show. It takes less time, costs less money, has bigger fonts so older people can read them better, is not dependent on having a fast Internet connection (or even a computer or electricity), and is free of all of the errors, deceptions, bad numbers, and using the wrong methodology of doing most everything important in the whole process.

At about 23:00, the narrator again goes into its primitive risk (loss) tolerance feature. Then the only way all of this appears to work, is that it shows how much the most poorly-constructed investment portfolio you can get would have lost during the Great Recession.

Then to add insult to injury, he says at 23:30, "...how much can they stand to lose before they called and say hey put me in all cash." So they advocate using money management techniques that are all about "buying high and selling at the bottom." This is just telling Dummy financial advisors that it's just fine to let dummy investors go to all cash at the very bottom, after losing tons of money (most likely from taking their advice to buy at the top). Then this is exactly what the dummy investor will end up doing. This is exact opposite of how life works in the Real World, what advisors should be advising, and what investors should be doing in the Real World. If this is all it Does, then this is reason #12 why Finra should ban it.

On their Super Solve What-if function - this makes it easy to see the bottom lines on a few scenarios at once, whereas with ours and others, you can only see these one at a time. The point is, that other than being able to see them all at once, ours will perform ALL of these functions, and hundreds of What-ifs that MoneyGuidePro can't. This is because Excel has a built-in feature called Goal Seek.

So when it comes to being able to perform all of the actual What-if scenarios that come up in the Real World, MoneyGuidePro, and all code-driven financial plan software, are only able to perform about 5% of what you can model using Excel-based financial plan software. Then, since it just ignores cash flow and new worth projections, any and all What-ifs are meaningless because it's incapable of properly forecasting anything correctly in the first place.

At 28:25 he says, "...and look at what the appropriate allocation is for you based on your risk tolerance.... This is soooo not true and was reason #4 why Finra should ban it above. Their recommended asset allocation is even more dangerously primitive than just using our Investment Fact Finder to determine it, because it only takes one life factor, current risk tolerance, into account (ours takes five life factors into account, so it dials it down more than any other investment software). Then they say it's appropriate, when this portfolio hasn't even been built by the user yet. So there's no way they can tell if the advisor built an appropriate investment portfolio in the first place.

Then their Target Band feature uses information that's not only useless in the Real World, but is just downright dangerous, because it's guaranteed to be completely wrong going forward. All of the following things that show on this page are guaranteed to NOT happen in the future: Average return, Worst One Year, Standard Deviation, and an average inflation rate (4.35%) rate going back so far into the last century that it's like doing financial planning for someone on another planet. Inflation of over 4% is probably not going to happen again in the 21^st century other than maybe one-year here and there. Using averages of anything from the 70's is just so wrong that it's not believable.

Using this goal-focused methodology creates an enormous "fake need" (just like MoneyTree Easy Money), and is just a deceptive sales gimmick to force the investors into giving the advisor much more money to invest than what's really needed to reach their goals. Why don't we all just use an assumed inflation rate of 10%? That's much more "worst-case conservative" and thus is way safer and really helps to ensure that the plan will reach their goals. It will also let the software say the clients' need to invest several times what's actually needed to reach their goals, so we'd make several times more money! What an awesome deal, isn't America great! So this is reason #13 why Finra should just ban it altogether.

Then even after inputting all of their investment assets (this isn't even the Prospect Demo Dog & Pony Show anymore, this is the actual financial plan), their proposed portfolio is the most-poorly constructed you can get. MoneyGuidePro doesn't claim to be investment software, so it's not even meant to help build investment portfolios. So you'll need to buy additional software (like Morningstar) to do all of that work.

At 29:31, their results show that this plan has less than 40% chance of funding their goals. If you were to input this same data in the IFP, the result of the Monte Carlo simulation would say it's less than 10%. So even their most pessimistic current plan is wildly optimistic. This is because their simulator only iterates one factor, the average rate of return. In the Real World, both the average tax rate and inflation are enormous factors that need to be accounted for, and they're completely ignoring them (and ours does not, it iterates taxes, inflation, and the average rate of return, then uses around three times as many iterations in the simulation).

Then at 29:37, their (Average Return and Bad Timing data) tachometer shows their proposed recommended plan as rudimentary as possible. This "financial plan" has 100% CHANCE OF REACHING THEIR GOALS, YOU'RE 100% IN THE GREEN COMFORT ZONE! This is guaranteed to NOT EVER HAPPEN, and so it's reason #14 that Finra should ban it.

The first thing all Finra licensing exams teach the brand new dummy advisor, is that you Definitely cannot under any circumstances tell people that you can guarantee ANYTHING in life other than death and taxes. So MoneyGuidePro is in so many Direct violations of most all Finra's "prime directives" that it's just not believable that they've allowed to fester the most popular vendor. It should be completely and immediately banned if they really cared about the interests of the investing public.

Here's just one thing about MoneyGuidePro that's good medicine for investors - their Concentrated Positions page does something to help. But this is something you could have made better yourself in a Word Doc in a few minutes.

About their "What are you afraid of" feature. You can do all of the work that their "Needs, Wants, and Wishes" and increasing inflation, and outliving assets, and Social Security being cut, and returns being less than expected, and health care costs rising features do even better with our software, and not have to jump around waiting for screens to load all of the time.

With the IFP you can actually model them much better, because you have control over every number in every year, which is something you cannot do with MoneyGuidePro. It just Doesn't seduce you with the cool tachometer dials all moving around at once. This is way cool, but the numbers are so inaccurate that Finra should ban this whole set of misleading features.

Next their "Inside the numbers: Start With Average Return" feature. This is good, but again, you have total control over not only what the overall portfolio's return is in every year with our financial plan software, but you can also set the rate of return for EACH INDIVIDUAL ASSET to be whatever you want them to be in any year too. This is something important that MoneyGuidePro cannot do.

So you have very limited control over this feature with theirs and total control using ours. For example their "Bad timing stress test" only does one thing - and that's modeling negative returns for only the first two years when retirement starts. So it's extremely limited, whereas with ours, there's no limits on what you can model here. One would think that the #1 vendor would allow you to model worst case scenarios much better than this, as it barely does these needed jobs at all.

Around 35:10: He goes into Monte Carlo again. This time the Numbers are so far from reality that the above rants look like compliments. Their tachometer shows an average probability of success in the 80's range, when ours would show only in the 20's. For example at 39:35, he says, "...so what we do is we randomize 10,000 sequences of returns and through those 10,000 iterations we want to look at all of the different types of return that the client might expect based on the standard deviation of their particular portfolio..."

Why Finra should ban all of this was stated above. Now a new reason (other than it really only iterates about 75 times, not 10,000), their Monte Carlo simulator uses past standard deviations. The problem with that is that sigmas are much more unstable than returns. So the bottom line is that their simulator has resulting numbers that WILL NOT OCCUR IN THE FUTURE. By far, nobody's simulator I've ever seen has a worse false set of outcomes than this.

Then he says, "...in 84% of those trials, you are able to fund your goals and still have a safety margin." Then they have a Safety Margin bar showing that it's somewhere between $9M and $400k. This is as far from reality as you can get, and should be banned.

That's the end of their demo on the investment side. Now onto their insurance modules.

Since they didn't even do a rudimentary budgeting and cash flow input, or account for pre-retirement surpluses / deficits / replacements, there's no way to properly determining how much disability insurance, long-term care insurance, or life insurance, anyone actually needs. So most all of this is just coming out of thin air, because the basic input data needed to calculate is not even there (even if you had the data, there's no input field controls for any of it). This is reason #16 why Finra should ban it.

Then in case you didn't notice, MoneyGuidePro does not even account for annual pre-retirement cash flow surpluses and deficits. It can't even try because it doesn't even perform a budget and cash flow analysis. It totally ignores one of the most biggest items in family budgeting - replacement costs of things you know will need to be bought. So it just completely ignores the very "heart of financial planning," and therefore just makes up ALL of these critical bottom line projected numbers out of thin air.

Remember that the whole program is "goal focused," which is completely wrong, and not "cash flow-based" which is completely right (and is the way the IFP does it). The reason is that it's just way too hard to program how things actually work in the Real World when using "code" (compared to using Excel, and letting Microsoft do all of the heavy lifting by programming the code).

This is my stupid little opinion on what happened here: They started out wanting to create actual integrated and comprehensive financial planning software that accurately forecasts people's financial lives. Then the programmers whined that just accounting for pre-retirement annual cash flow surpluses and deficits and replacement costs correctly was too hard and couldn't be done without a massive infusion of resources.

So management looked at the cost of "doing it right" and said, "Well it's too expensive to do it right by accounting for cash flows and then having all of that project into a insurance needs and retirement modules. And account for replacement costs? Yeah right, dummy advisors don't even know what that is. Then if we did, we'd just have the same thing as other real planners that do it right. Then we wouldn't have anything different, then we wouldn't sell very much. So here's a brilliant idea, we'll just bag the whole deal where the program accounts for everything correctly, then we'll brand it as financial planning software that's unique in some way. So we'll call it Goal Focused Planning Software."

If their code programmers are "too lame" to make the critical calculations of accounting for annual pre-retirement cash flow surpluses and Deficits and replacement costs, then how can you trust it to both "do your clients' taxes" and project retirement scenarios?

If they got their accounting for annual pre-retirement cash flow surpluses and deficits and replacement costs correct, then I wouldn't whine about it. I'd just assume that someone did another great job at programming, then it would be worth the price. But when things as critical as these are just ignored, because it's too hard, then you know most other critical functions and calculations that are also "hard" are going to just be ignored too. When I was programming the IFP's cash flow surpluses and deficits function, every hour I'd think, "Now I know this is something that code-driven software will never do right as it's just too complex. It would take your average code programmer a year full-time just to work that out, and they can't afford anything like that."

I suspect that they may be doing this on purpose too. If you Don't properly account for cash flow surpluses, then they can't be used to fund investments. So this creates much much much more of a "need." Filling Needs is what the biz is all about.

The more need, the more needs to be funded by investing more into loaded mutual funds and whole life insurance or annuities today. So the program is creating an enormous false inflated need by not investing surpluses.

On the flip side, if there's cash flow deficits, then these aren't accounted for either. The same with ignoring replacement costs. So this allows the Dummy Rep to say "You can afford to invest $X monthly to secure your retirement" when in reality they can't afford to even invest half that much. What a deal!

So if the client falls for this, which they will because they don't know anything about financial plans, then this allows the Rep to get them to invest more with them today. This is probably yet another reason for it being "BD approved." Everyone in that "cartel / cabal" "approves" of the Rep making more money by showing a higher need to invest than reality dictates, because it feeds the system much more than just solving for their actual needs. "What's wrong with getting Americans to invest more, our savings rate is the lowest in the world?!"

I just think if you want to show a worst case scenario, then you should be doing much more than just ignoring surpluses and deficits. With the IFP you'd just do that in the Current version and show how you're going to deal with it in the Proposed version. And then run a Monte Carlo simulation on those scenarios. This is not only a much better way of doing it, but it will show more of a "worst case need" than MoneyGuidePro's malfunctioning worst case scenario calculations.

As you can see in their demo video (around 37:30), the narrator completely blows past the whole explanation of how the program inputs, calculates, and presents disability insurance, long-term care insurance, and life insurance needs. That's because it doesn't, because it can't, because the input data is not there in the first place. And then it ignores deficits and surpluses and replacement costs. So he just skips this whole section and moves onto the report generators at 37:52.

So if you're the consumer and have had a "financial plan" made for you by an advisor using MoneyGuidePro, and they recommended so much in Disability insurance, you need to know that these numbers were not calculated by the program, they are all 100% totally made up out of thin air. The same for any long-term care (nursing home insurance) and life insurance needs too. The program is incapable of determining accurate life insurance needs because it fails to account for surpluses that would be invested, reductions in debts over time, and there's not even an input for a discount rate to calculate net present value of the breadwinner's incomes. All of this results in the software Displaying life insurance needs that are much more than what's really needed.

For advisors using MoneyGuidePro, you're exposing yourself to massive "errors and omissions" by using it. As soon as a client figures out that you just made most of this up without any basis of fact, then that big fat chicken is going to be coming home to roost on your front doorstep. Then even if you have good E&O insurance, just one case could bankrupt you because of the enormous Deductible you'll have to pay out of your own pocket before it starts to pay.

So if you're thinking that you're off the hook because "this software is approved by Finra / Broker Dealer cartel / cabal," and so it was "the system" that approved of all of these shenanigans, you are WRONG! Finra and your BD are going to leave you to hang out to dry to fend for yourself like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

The one and only way to both do the right things for your clients, and not be exposed to this huge risk, is to ban goals-based software yourself, and buy financial plan software that ACTUALLY CALCULATES TRUE NEEDS FOR DI, LTC, and LIFE INSURANCE.

You think because you're buying from the #1 approved software vendor that all of these crucial bases would have been adequately covered Decades ago, and everything has been tried and tested, and works in the best interest of you and your clients.

If so, then You have NO CLUE on how primitive, pathetic, and just hopelessly broken the whole financial service industry is. But you'll find out once your clients start doing their due Diligence, by reading things like this page. The whole system from A to Z is so broken that there's no hope. MoneyGuidePro being "approved" is all the proof Needed.

Those are going be the most expensive chickens coming home roosting in your life - beyond your worst nightmares (especially if you're just a new "dummy planner" and don't have the first idea of what any of this is really all about).

So this is how the #1 vendor "helps you sell insurance?" This is why BD's love it because it helps their Reps sell too much insurance? You'd think that these modules would have had by far the most attention put into them so they calculate the most accurate needs numbers, but nooooooooooooooo, they Didn't do hardly anything with them, didn't even try to do any real programming here. All they care about is that you'll think it's "slick, easy to use, and saves you time," so you'll keep buying it. If your practice focuses mostly on insurance sales, then you should buy those modules from Advicent.

So you need to wake up and smell the coffee before your clients do, because most all of their numbers for disability insurance, nursing home insurance, and life insurance needs were not even calculated. The program Didn't even ask for the basic input needed to calculate them. Then the whole heart of the financial planning process (accounting for annual cash flow Deficits / surpluses / replacements) is totally ignored.

The best way to do that is to buy our life insurance calculator, use it to get actual numbers, and then start the complaint process. First, complain to the planner / agent that made the recommendations (of telling you that you needed to buy way too much life insurance, just so they'd make more commissions). That won't go anywhere, so then complain to their branch manager. That probably won't go anywhere either, so complain to Finra that you were bamboozled into spending thousands more in premiums than you actually needed to - all because they use MoneyGuidePro fake financial software. This is the one and only way you can get any of your money back.

So once your clients find out that everything regarding calculating insurance needs is a fiction, you're going to hear about it. Then you'll wish you did homework on buying financial planning software, instead of Just plodding along with the herd and doing what your BD told you to do, "Just buy MoneyGuidePro, we approve of it, it's what everyone else here uses, were a "MoneyGuidePro shop" and that's really all we're going to allow you to use anyway, so just be a good soldier and get with the program and we'll leave you alone and your life working here will be much better, OR ELSE!"

So if you're a client of financial advisor and have had a financial plan made using MoneyGuidePro, then here's how you can do an audit, so you can see in great detail, how all of this is true: MoneyGuidePro allows clients to access their financial plans made by advisors online! Really, they Did, but if you have the one-user deal, then it's extra money for that "add-on." So all you have to do is get them to use the feature called "MANAGE SMART Portal," then they create a new user-ID and password for you, then you go there, login, and you're working with the same financial software they were.

Then you can buy real financial planning software from us that actually calculates these numbers with the most accuracy. Then you can Do a detailed comparison and see for yourself to your heart's content. You'd start doing this by looking at the input fields for the MGP insurance modules. Then you'll see that the program didn't do any of these calculations. All of the Numbers showing how much insurance you need to buy were just manually input into an input field by the agent - just because that's how much they thought you'd be willing to buy today. No math, no logic, no insuring for actual needs; just a wishful thinking face amount input in hopes that you're dumb enough to just buy it today so they can get their huge commission ASAP.

So if you're thinking, "Oh this guy just has sour grapes because he wasn't invited to the "Finra / BD / software approval cartel / cabal party" and is just ranting about anything and everything in hopes of making more money, so it's all BS. My brilliant, caring, and trusted financial advisor would never do what this guy is ranting about to me!"

Well with MoneyGuidePro, now you can run the numbers and see for yourself. Take all of the time you need. Our financial plan software has more "transparency" than any other vendor, so you can see exactly how all of the Numbers are calculated. This is the only way to see that's there's no shenanigans going on over here, just truth in numbers. MoneyGuidePro has zero transparency, so there's zero way to tell what's going on regarding number calculation. Even Money Tree has a rudimentary "audit trail" feature.

Then just compare the results of the two plans. If you have more than a few brain cells, the time and tenacity to do the work, then you will see the night and day differences in these two completely different ways of making financial plans. This is the only way you're going to be able to prove to yourself that everything here is true and not made up.

The truth is in the numbers. One set of numbers are calculated using a methodology that best matches the Real World (the theme of this site), and one is a not even close to being in the ballpark fiction, basically created just to be Focused on the Goal of getting you to "buy more now." The more work you do, the more you'll see this is the case. The truth is all out there, it's not hiding, and all you need to do is the hard work to look and you will find it.

On their company Information page it says, "PIEtech is dedicated to one thing - helping advisors use financial planning to more effectively motivate each client to create, implement and maintain an investment strategy that best meets their lifetime financial goals."

The first part it true, the slickness of the program seduces one into getting with the program, but the second half is as far from being true as you can get. It's so far from being the "best way to maintain an investment strategy to meet their lifetime goals" that it's the worst (not really, MoneyTree is even worse when the rubber actually meets the road). It doesn't even have the tools needed to build an investment portfolio, so they leave it up to the advisor. Finra is just asleep at the wheel when it comes to this.

Then on the same page, they say, "...supports a sophisticated, goal-oriented planning process that is more meaningful to the client and more productive for the advisor." This is true, but they do it by using numbers that are incorrect, a total falsehood in the main area the client is paying to advisor to excel in. Focusing on goals may be more meaningful to clients, and this way of selling more today may be more productive to the Rep. But it's doing all of that based on numbers that are not even remotely correct.

Several times when you click Back it goes back more than one page, so you lose your place and train of thought a lot. So the best way to minimize that annoyance is to right click and use "Open in a New Window."

SmartAlex is just a few directions pages with a computerized voice that just reads the same text you're reading.

Now on to their sample plan report PDFs:

Asset Allocation Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/AssetAllocation-Historical.pdf): The first two pages, of 18, are 90% white space that you could have made better in Word in a few minutes.

Pages 3 - 6 are about their Monte Carlo results. Other than Monte Carlo being so useless in financial planning and investment management that it should be banned by Finra, the only thing to whine about here is that their probability numbers so several times too high. I know if I input the same sample data into the IFP, their 81% would be below 30%.

Page 7: There's little-to-no useful information here, but I wanted to point out that their proposed / recommended / Target portfolio shows losing 3% (and then 1%) MORE than their current portfolio! Apparently Finra thinks it's just fine that dummy Reps recommended investment portfolios with MORE RISK than the ones client's came to them with in the first place. Reason #18 why Finra needs to wake up and ban it.

Page 8 is just a list of portfolio optimizer results on 11 "optimized portfolios on the efficient frontier." If you believe any of this Nonsense (that Finra should just ban) has any value in the Real World whatsoever, then you just didn't read this page about portfolio optimizers yet.

Page 9 is just historical backtesting on hypothetical portfolios using Morningstar data. So all of this is a total fiction and has zero value when it comes to predicting what's really going to happen in the Real World. So this page has no value either because backtesting just uses past returns, which will never ever occur again in the future.

So far we're half way done, and there's Not one thing of value (to people that actually know how the world really works. If a salesperson can use it to sell more insurance and American Funds today, then that has value).

Page 10 is just a dumbed-down imitation of our Source and Applications of Funds section of the Asset Allocator sheet. So this is the first page so far that has any value.

Page 11 is a lame version of what the whole Asset Allocator sheet of our asset allocation calculator is all about, so it has value.

Page 12 is total BS because little-to-no risk assessment was even done in the first place. Then it compares Investment risk tolerance of actual people to a "group of similar people." This has no value whatsoever, and should be banned. Individuals are usually very Different than the masses of the same age group.

Pages 13 - 18 are just disclaimers designed to get the advisor off the hook if a lawsuit ever shows up because of using investment software so terrible that if should banned by Finra. Guess what, it won't.

College Funding Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/CollegePlan-Historical.pdf): Of the 25 pages, the first 11 are just the same disclaimers as above again.

Page 12 is just text showing people basic data they already know about themselves, so it has no value (and you could have done better yourself using Word in a minute).

Pages 13 and 14 are just tables of historical returns showing how much they would have lost in bear markets, which has no value (and you could have done better yourself using Word in a minute).

Pages 15 and 16 show an estimate of how much of a shortfall is projected. So far, there's no more going on here than you can get for free using a free online college calculator.

Than pages 18 - 20 are the same things as above, but showing better funding via investing more money. The big problem there is that it shows that the "Estimated % of Goals Funded" is 100%. This will never ever happen, so it should be banned.

Pages 21 - 23 are just pages you could have made better in Word in a few minutes saying that they need to invest more money to reach this goal.

Pages 24 and 25 have semi-useful charts showing how much more or less of different asset classes should be invested in. But if this is coming from the output of an optimizer, then it has little-to-no value.

So that's it, MoneyGuidePro's college funding module isn't much more than you can get for free using a free online college calculator, whereas the IFP has the comprehensive college planners.

Estate Planning Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/EstateAnalysis-Projected.pdf): Yes, MoneyGuidePro has an obsolete estate planning module. This is one of the reasons why it costs so much.

The estate planning section is mostly irrelevant because of the 2013 law changes. So these numbers are not only very incorrect, but mostly just gone after 2010. This whole section should have just been deleted in Jan '11, but the people working there may not even be keeping up on such things, so they probably didn't even know (they sure didn't read this page).

In case you didn't know, this module is responsible for about a quarter to a third of the financial plan software's cost. This is an extreme programming Nightmare, constantly changing, tedious with millions of gotchas, and very expensive to maintain because the code programmers have to work closely with someone that actually knows how all that works, so there's at least two expensive people on their payroll working on code, that since 2010, has little-to-no value to anyone in the Real World anymore. So if you're wondering why MoneyGuidePro costs more than twice what it should, it's mostly because of this. So you're paying up for software that you'll never use (and no you can't Delete just their obsolete estate planner to save money).

The first 13 of 33 pages is just boilerplate text on estate planning.

At least they ran their reports after the 2010 law changes, unlike MoneyTree that still uses pre-2010 law in their reports.

Here's the bottom line on this whole deal with their "Goal-Focused" way of calculating numbers. They're all so far from reality that it shows the Boomers having over $4M when they die. The chances of the Boomer having even $1M left after paying for all of their goals is slim to none, and Slim left town long ago. So more than likely, someone just made up the numbers in a different version of the financial plan just to illustrate the need to sell their estate planning module. There's no way this jives with the rest of the plan. If I were to input the same data into the IFP, then the Boomers would have totally ran out of money around age 80, and their estate at this time would be poverty level.

The rest of their estate plan reports is just basic presentation data, and then the same with their numbers plopped into it. Then it shows how they can reduce paying estate taxes if they do all of the usual life insurance-funded trusting and gifting shenanigans.

But keep in mind that everything on this report is WRONG!!! There's a $5M exemption after the 2013 law, and their total combined estate (which is inflated several times of what it should be if their software calculated numbers correctly), is not even over $5M! The biggest number on any of these page is only $4.8M - so no estate taxes are due period. So all of their reports show paying estate taxes WHEN NONE ARE EVEN DUE AT ALL!!! This is all of the proof you need that MoneyGuidePro can't even calculate basic numbers correctly. So this is reason #20 why Finra should ban it.

Lifetime Income Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/LifetimeIncomePlan-Historical.pdf): What does this even do? Not much. Of its 13 pages, only two has anything on it. And these two pages are not understandable and so are mostly meaningless.

The other three pages, with something other than the same boilerplate text that's on all of the other PDFs, are just results of the Monte Carlo simulation. So it's just duplicates of other reports, with numbers that both don't make sense and have little value (because the whole Monte Carlo thing Does little-to-nothing of value in financial planning).

Retirement Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/RetirementZoomer-Historical.pdf): Of this report's 27 pages, the first 13 are the same disclaimer text that's on most of the others.

Pages 13 and 14 are just text showing things they already know about themselves, like what their goals are, and you could have made it better using Word in a few minutes.

Page 15 is actually something of value for a change. It shows cash flow expenses for goals using different colors and when they're paid. But it doesn't say if the program actually did an analysis using these numbers, it just shows the expenses over time.

Nothing on page 16 and then page 17 is the same current net worth snapshot as seen on other reports (still no projections of net worth, because the program doesn't even calculate it).

Pages 18 & 19 are just text showing their insurance policies, Social Security, assets, and liabilities. So there's nothing going on here other than telling the Boomers what they already know.

Pages 20 & 21 is the same mostly useless risk loss tolerance and assessment that's on other reports.

Then finally we go to the "Results." Again, this is as useless, and wrong, and you can get. All it shows are two tachometers - one showing current Monte Carlo results of less than 40% chance of reaching goals, and the other proposed showing 100% chance of reaching goals. This is all total BS and Finra should just ban it. Nothing in the Real World is 100%. Both numbers were pulled from thin air because of the lack of data and then the program really doesn't even calculate anything. So all it is are two erroneous Monte Carlo simulation results, then the text showing the difference between these two scenarios. Any time you see "100%" in financial planning, run for the hills!

Then pages 26 & 27 are the "Action Plan." There's little-to-no action nor plan here at all. Page 26 is just text showing what the Boomers told the planner, and all page 27 is a lame version of our Source and Application of Funds section again.

So this whole report is mostly useless because it's just fluff text, then what beef is there is already on the other reports, then if it doesn't just tell the Boomers what they already know, it's just useless results of (one) Monte Carlo simulation.

Projected Retirement Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/RetirementLifestylePlan-Projected.pdf): This is the same mostly useless report as above, but with different rates of return, so it has little value either.

Projected Retirement Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/RetirementZoomer-Projected.pdf): This is the same thing as the two reports above, so I don't know why it's even there.

Insurance Report (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/InsuranceAnalysis-Projected.pdf): Again and as usual, of the 27 pages, the first 12 are just the same disclaimer fluff as the other reports.

Then pages 13 -15 are just text telling the Boomers what they already know. So it's just a list of their insurance policies.

Then pages 16 - 19 are a rudimentary life insurance needs analysis. It's just a current capital needs snapshot, so there's no future need projections. I don't see anything on any of these pages that you could have done yourself better using a free online life insurance calculator.

So it looks like the program is actually doing something of value here, but because it pretty much ignores annual cash flows, it's not accounting for much of anything that needs to go into an actual life insurance needs analysis. If you don't account for pre-retirement cash flow surpluses and deficits and replacements (both before and during retirement), future needs and/or breadwinner earnings, then you have no idea what actual capital needs are. So the bottom line numbers are somewhere between pulled out of thin air and what you could calculate for free with a free online calculator.

Pages 20 through 25 are the disability needs reports. This was obviously pulled out of thin air, and little-to-no calculations were performed either. It's obvious because on the first chart, the green section showing income need, is a straight line. If the program properly accounted for any cash flows (required for determining DI needs), then this line would be anything but straight (see it on our Cash Flow Projector demo). So all it's doing is just taking the current year's number and extrapolating all expenses using an unrealistic inflation rate. So again, this is something that you could have done yourself using a free online disability insurance calculator. In order to determine actual needs, you must net out replacements, annual expenses, incomes, and cash flow deficits. The program does little-to-none of these required calculations (as you can see on their graph).

Pages 26 & 27 are the long-term care reports showing what would happen if the Boomers had to go into a nursing home.

After looking at the numbers, it appears that all this does is add up the total annual bills, then it subtracts what LTC insurance pays, and this amount gets deducted from the current investment portfolio as a lump sum (at retirement). All of this is as wrong as you can get, and it's because the program is not designed to work the way the Real World actually works - which is cash flow-based. So all it does is take the net cost and subtract it from investments (then it doesn't even say in what year this happens).

The Whole Financial Plan on One PDF (https://cdn.moneyguidepro.com/pdf/SampleReports/FullFinancialGoalPlan-Historical.pdf): This is just all of the above reports put into one PDF.

Here a report that's not in the others: Page 17 shows average life expectancies, but it uses an ancient "Annuity 2000 Mortality Table." In other words, these numbers came from a life insurance company over a dozen years ago. The one and only correct mortality table to use are the 2006 Unisex Mortality Tables published by the IRS. Anything other than that is obsolete and just wrong. So this is yet another MGP "code malfunction" (probably just because it would cost too much to update their code to the correct mortality table, because that's just how "broken" most everything really is).

So as you can see, the vast majority of their 217-page sample financial plan is just useless fluff, disclaimers, and text pages showing what the Boomers told the planner. Less than a quarter of it has any beef at all.

Then if you omit all of the Monte Carlo nonsense, it's around 20% beef. Then if you omit all of the text pages about funding goals, it's around 15% beef. These text pages about goals are then mostly text you could have done better using Word because it doesn't do hardly anything with actual cash flows, but take the current year's ballpark expenses and add a too high inflation rate, it's all mostly nonsense.

Believe it or not, that's all there is to MoneyGuidePro (I only believe it because I'm one of the very few people that totally get how hopelessly broken everything in this biz is!).

Comments from their Users (click to send a comment)

None so far other than this blurb from here ( http://www.advisorsforadvisors.com/technology/advisor-applications/article/8085-NaviPlan-select-the-next-generation-for-NaviPlan-extended-and-standard ):

"Cash-Flow Versus Goal-Based Financial Planning Software: For some planners, however, MoneyGuidePro�s goal-based approach remained unacceptable--even after MGP built in some cash-flow functionality. To these advisors, any plan not based detailed cash flow projections was simply not good enough at modeling the future. For such detail-oriented advisors, NaviPlan Extended remained the solution of choice, rivaled only by SunGard Planning Station. "

Financial Planning Software Modules For Sale
(are listed below)

Financial Planning Software that's Fully-Integrated
(the IFP is the NaviPlan alternative for 1/6th the price)

Goals-Only "Financial Planning Software"
(the MoneyGuidePro alternative for 1% of their price)

Retirement Planning Software Menu: Something for Everyone
(the RWRs, RP, and SRP)

Comprehensive Asset Allocation Software

Model Portfolio Allocations with Historical Returns

Monthly-updated ETF and Mutual Fund Picks

Investment Portfolio Benchmarking Program

Financial Planning Fact Finders for Financial Planners Gathering Data from Clients

Investment Policy Statement Software (IPS)

Life Insurance Calculator (AKA Capital Needs Analysis Software)

Bond Calculators for Duration, Convexity, YTM, Accretion, and Amortization

Investment Software for Comparing the 27 Most Popular Methods of Investing

Rental Real Estate Investing Software

Net Worth Calculator (Balance Sheet Maker) and 75-year Net Worth Projector

College Savings Calculator

Financial Seminar Covering Retirement Planning and Investment Management

Sales Tools for Financial Adviser Marketing

Personal Budget Software and 75-year Cash Flow Projector

TVM Financial Tools and Financial Calculators

Our Unique Financial Services
(are listed below)

We're Fee-only Money Managers: So you can hire us to manage your money, and/or financial advisers can hire us to manage client money, using our Model Portfolios and/or Asset Allocation Systems

Consulting Services: Hire Us to Make Your Financial Plan, Retirement Plan, Benchmarking Report, Whatever

Buy or Sell a Financial Planning Practice

Miscellaneous Pages of Interest
(are listed below)

Primer Tutorial to Learn the Basics of Financial Planning Software

About the Department of Labor's New Fiduciary Rules

Using Asset Allocation to Manage Money

Download Brokerage Data into Spreadsheets

How to Integrate Financial Planning Software Modules to Share Data

CRM and Portfolio Management Software

About Monte Carlo Simulators

About Efficient Frontier Portfolio Optimizers

Calculating Your Investment Risk Tolerance

About Discount Brokers for DIY Money Management

About 401(k) Plan Management

Financial Planner Features and Functions	IFP: $500	MoneyGuidePro: $1,300 to over $2,000
Annual Update Prices	$135	100% of what you initially paid
Lifetime Subscriptions Available	Yes	No
Do You Have to Buy it for a Whole Year?	No, you can pay a whole $2 to use it for one day	Yes, you have to pay their whole annual cost to use it, even if you only need it for a week
Asset Allocator Module	Yes, and comprehensive	Barely, very primitive with little control over anything important
Number of Asset Classes their Asset Allocation Software Uses	Unlimited	11 (ten plus one miscellaneous, so only one can be changed). It "doesn't do much of anything" so you'll still need to come up with your own investment Strategy and funding options yourself
Deals with Pre-retirement Annual Cash Flow Surpluses and Deficits (the very heart of the financial plan)	Yes, with total control over which assets they flow in and out of annually, because it's 100% "cash flow-based"	No, it ignores pre-retirement annual cash flow surpluses and deficits! This is because it's "goal-focused"
Integration with Other Financial Software and/or Ability to Download Account Holdings from Online Custodians	Yes to both	Yes, it has he best integration with other programs
Gets Detailed Annual Expenses, Incomes, and Income Goals at Retirement from other Software (like our Personal Budget & Cash Flow Projector)	Yes	No, it's not "cash flow-based" so most all critical details are ignored
Built-in Budgeting and Cash Flow Modules	Yes, and comprehensive	Somewhat, with little-to-no control over anything
Accounts for Budgeting of Replacement Costs	Yes, total control	No, totally ignored
Built-in College Planner Module	Yes, and comprehensive	Somewhat, little better than using a free online college calculator
Database of College Costs	No, it's best to either look current costs up online, or call the college because of stale data	No(?)
Life Insurance Calculator Module Included	Yes	Yes, a very primitive capital needs calculator that's little better than using a free online life insurance calculator
Ability to Project Life Insurance Needs into the Future	Yes	No, it only shows current needs
Life Insurance Needs Module: Ability to Account for Replacing ALL Incomes, Set the Number of Years for it to be Replaced, the Percentage of it to be Replaced, then have a Unique Discount Rate Input for All Incomes Individually. Next, Ability to Choose Between Inputting Needs and Available Resources via Manual Input or Automatically (where numbers are internally generated from inside the financial plan)	Yes to All	No to All
Life Insurance Needs Module: Ability to have the Same Features and Functionality for Calculating the Client's Capital Needs if the Spouse Passes in Every Year	Yes	No
Ability to Easily Stop Life Insurance Policies (paying for premiums and face values), and/or Change Face Amounts (or premiums) in Any Year	Yes	No, once you input a life policy, everything runs amok forever, even after retirement
Number of Versions	Unlimited, and you can see two at a time	You can only see two at a time, then you'd need to make a new version (client)
Ability to Easily Make a Proposed Plan from Current Plan Data	Yes	Yes
Total Control Over Printing	Yes	No control at all, unless you want to edit PDFs (you'll need special hard-to-use software to do that)
Ability to See ALL Inputted Data on One Page	Yes	No
Ability to Perform Any and All Advanced "What-if" and Scenario Functions	Yes	No to very limited, Super Solve only lets you have about five scenarios
Built-in Portfolio Optimizer	No, but you can calculate the usual portfolio statistics of interest (correlation coefficients, Beta, Alpha, R-squared, Treynor and Sharpe ratios)	Yes (but probably doesn't allow you to calculate most statistics)
Monte Carlo Simulator	Yes	No, only iterates rate of return, then it uses standard deviations, which is "wrong"
Monte Carlo Simulator on the College Planning Modules	Yes	Yes
Ability to Designate a Financial Plan as the Current or Proposed Version with One Click	Yes, there all the time, no need to click	Yes, there all the time, no need to click
Ability to See Both Current or Proposed Versions at the Same Time	Yes	Yes
Input Spouse's Data Separately	Yes	Yes
Designate an Asset Account as Belonging to Client or Spouse	Yes	Yes
Designate an Asset Account as Jointly Owned	Yes	Yes
Ability to Have Client and Spouse Retire in Different Years	Yes	Yes
Total Control Over Social Security Between the Two People Separately	Yes	No
Ability to Change Social Security Income for Each Person Separately, AND in Every Year	Yes	No
Ability to Control the Social Security Tax Inclusion Rate in Every Year	Yes, you can choose between 0%, 50%, or 85% in each year	No
Ability to Set the Age Social Security Starts for Both People Separately	Yes	Yes
Ability to Include Any and All Sources of Annual Miscellaneous Expenses, in Addition to the Generic Annual Income Goal	Yes, you can control every dollar in every year	Yes, but limited
Ability to Include Any and All Sources of Annual Miscellaneous Incomes	Yes	Yes, but limited
Ability to Control Withdrawals Using IRS Age 70½ Required Minimum Distributions	Yes	No (maybe, but couldn't find it, so probably not)
Ability to Control Withdrawals Using IRS 72t Distributions	Yes, all three methods	No
Investment Account Payout Methods	9	1(maybe more, but couldn't find how to input them)
Ability to Change Asset Payout Methods Midstream	Yes	No
Ability to Start and Stop Asset Withdrawals at Any Year	Yes	No
Ability to Start Asset Withdrawals After Retirement Has Begun	Yes	No
Ability to Start a New Asset at Any Year (even after retirement has started for anyone)	Yes	No
Ability to Set Asset Account Rate of Returns to be Whatever You Want in Any Year	Yes	No
Ability to Have Total Control Over How Much Asset Account Contributions are, and When They Start and Stop Annually	Yes	No, you can input contributions but there's little control over much
Ability to Control the Tax Rate in Every Year	Yes	No
Ability to Set a Tax Inclusion Rate on Each Asset Separately	Yes	Somewhat, limited
Presentation Page (report) that Shows Each Non-asset and Asset's Estimated Withdrawal Taxes in Every Year	Yes	No
Ability to Simulate Roth IRAs and Conversions	Yes	No
How Many Years the "Window" Is	75	No window at all, then it seems to stop at 40 years
Both Client and Spouse Can Have their Own Separate Income Goals, and they can be Whatever You Want in Every Year	Yes	No
Ability to See and Print All Miscellaneous Incomes and Expenses in Every Year	Yes	Somewhat, limited
Displays the Present Value of Additional Capital Needed to Fund the Combined Income Goal Deficits in Every Year	Yes	No
Displays All Basic and Advanced Pertinent Retirement Planning Information	Yes, much more relevant data displays than any other retirement planner	Very limited
Calculates and Displays How Much More Money is Needed to Reach the Retirement Goal as Monthly Payments Until Retirement	Yes	No(?)
Calculates and Displays How Much More Money is Needed to Reach the Retirement Goal as a Current Lump Sum	Yes	Yes
Calculates and Displays How Much More Money is Needed to Reach the Retirement Goal as a Current Lump Sum in All Years	Yes	No
Allows You to Set a Unique Rate of Return on How Much More Money is Needed to Reach the Retirement Goal (AKA discount rate)	Yes	No(?)
List All Assets with Pertinent Data (e.g., asset values, percentage this asset is of the whole, age when it becomes effective, contributions, payout ages, payout methods, rate of return assumed, and amount of income subject to taxes)	Yes	Somewhat, but limited
Lists All Non-Asset Incomes with Annual Amounts, Ages When They Start, COLA Inflation rates, and if it's Taxable or Not	Yes	Somewhat, limited
Everything Everywhere Displays Year, Both Ages, and Year Numbers for Quick and Better Understanding	Yes	No
Number of Asset Accounts Available	16 personal assets and 9 joint assets in each Current and Proposed version (for a total of 50 in each plan)	Probably unlimited(?)
Ability to Account for Fixed Assets Like Defined Benefit Pension Plans and Annuitized Annuities	Yes	Yes
Control Over Pensions Between the Two People Separately	Yes	Yes
Ability to Set a Survivor's Pension to Pay Out Reduced Benefit After Death	Yes, with total control over annual amounts too	Yes
Ability to Set an Annual COLA Rate for Fixed Assets Like Defined Benefit Pension Plans and Annuitized Annuities	Yes	Yes
Ability to Have Pensions and Other Assets Pay a Death Benefit to Cash Flow	Yes, with total control over annual amounts too	Yes, but there's little-to-no cash flow accounting going on in the first place because it's not "cash flow-based"
Displays the Amount of Annual Deficits When You'll Probably Run Out of Money	Yes	No
Displays When You'll Probably Run Out of Money (AKA "Gap funding")	Yes	Yes
Displays Annual Percent of Annual Income Goal Being Met	Yes	No
Displays Balance of Available Capital in Every Year With Percentage Increase or Decrease from the Previous Year	Yes	No
Displays the Average Weighted Rate of Return on All Investment Assets Combined in Every Year	Yes	No, unless you (input and) use a pre-defined model, then limited
Displays the Present Value of Additional Capital Needed at Retirement in Every Year	Yes	No
Displays the Present Value of Additional Capital Needed at Retirement in the Current Year	Yes	No
Number of Informative Charts and Graphs You can See While Working Already Set Up	Over 800	Only one or two per "screen"
Ability to Make as Many New Charts and Graphs as You Want	Yes	No
Ability to Change Charts and Graphs Any Way You Like	Yes	No
Detailed Chart of All Annual Miscellaneous Incomes and Expenses	Yes	Somewhat, limited
Ability to Control Income Goal Inflation Rates Both Automatically and Also Set Them to be Whatever You Want in Every Year	Yes	No
Layers of Annual Inflation of Income Goals	5	1
Ability to Set the Ending Year so Numbers will Stop Showing to Reduce Clutter	Yes	No need as there's usually no window at all showing annual numbers
Displays Each Person's Life Expectancy Age Using IRS Unisex Mortality Tables	Yes	No, uses an ancient and erroneous mortality table
Ability to Set a Life Expectancy Age Independently of the Calculated IRS Life Expectancy Age Using IRA Unisex Tables	Yes	Yes (they call it "Planning Age"), but uses an obsolete mortality table
Displays the Difference in Years Between the Inputted Life Expectancy Age and the Calculated IRS Life Expectancy Age	Yes	No
Displays Both the Number of Years and the Percentage of Retirement Years Where There's Both Sufficient and Insufficient Capital	Yes	No
Displays the Total Current Value of Assets and Total Current Annual Contributions	Yes	Somewhat, assets are usually all lumped together into one of their pre-defined models, so you have little-to-no idea what's actually going on with them
Displays All Sources of Income and Tells Where They're Coming from in Every Year	Yes	Somewhat
Ability to Set the Number of Trailing Zeros on Presentation Pages (so it won't show values down to the dollar if you don't want to see that much detail)	Yes	No
Input Validation and Detailed Error Messages to Tell You what You Did Wrong and How to Fix it	Yes	Yes(?)
Accounts for Any and All Types of Investment Assets, Including Rental Real Estate	Yes	Somewhat, limited
Displays Detailed About How Much Retirement Income is Being Withdrawn from Each Asset Individually	Yes	No
Has "Flexible Assets" that Pay Out Retirement Income Like Life Does in the Real World (AKA "as needed")	Yes	Yes, that's its main payout method, so little control over much if you want to model anything else
Allows Inputting of Investment Assets Using the "Bucket Approach" (used by asset allocators and retirement planners that want to model scenarios like depleting non-qualified assets before tapping into qualified assets)	Yes	No
Ability to Calculate Detailed Needs for Both Disability and Long Term Care Insurance	Yes	No, very little calculations done because it's not cash flow-based
Asset Account Draw-Down Analysis Tools	Very Limited	Comprehensive
Deals with Technical Details of 401(k)'s - like Catch-Up and Matches	Yes, you can integrate the IFP with the Most Functional 401(k) calculator	No
Ability to Turn Assets Providing Retirement Incomes On and Off Individually	Yes	No
Displays How Much in Investment Assets are Needed to Fund Annual Income Goals After All Sources of Non-asset Incomes are Accounted For	Yes	No
Displays Different Colors to Designate Between Client, Spouse, Both, and Data that Does Change With Input, and Not	Yes	No
Comes With a Detailed Fact Finders for Gathering Data From Clients	Yes, comprehensive	Yes, but not great
Comes With a Free Effective / Average Tax Bracket Calculator to Help Determine Inputted Tax Rates	Yes	No
Displays All Years of Information Automatically	Yes	No, little-to-no window at all
Complete User's Manual with Detailed Directions on How to Do Everything	Yes, including a list of Real World options if you run out of money too early, and much more valuable retirement planning information)	No, very limited help screens are only available when you're at the section of the program. They put all of these resources into having a computerized voice read you the same too-limited text
Phone and/or E-mail Support	Yes, but for more money, but it's rarely needed because there's little-to-no bugs and the directions are more than sufficient - few people e-mail or call for support anymore these days	Yes, included
Platform	Excel Based (making it extremely stable, inexpensive because uber-expensive code programmers don't need to be employed, bug free, will always work on any computer (Mac or PC) with Excel, any and all operating systems, and rarely needs of any kind of updating)	100% cloud-based
Transparency	Total, all data flows logically from left to right as if you were reading, then you can use Excel or a hand calculator to verify all numbers so you easily can trace EVERYTHING back to your input. No secrets, no surprises, no mysteries, just awesome data	None
Ability to Save Individual Client Files as a Unique File Name (so you can back them up onto your physical computer, so you can access old client input data even years after you let the software expire)	Yes, it's just a spreadsheet, so you have total control over saving client files. Not only that, you'll always have your client input data even when programs expire. Then you can just copy and paste it into the new version if you Update, or use it to input into other programs	Yes, but they stay in the dangerous cloud, so you can't back them up on your computer
Tax Software Included (software that will calculate taxes due, like TurboTax, or in reality, just estimate the current year's taxes due)	No	Not really, it doesn't even look like they tried to perform this futile task
Cost Benefit Ratio Feature	Yes, unique to the IFP	No
Number of Computers One "Copy" Will Run On	Unlimited, just spreadsheets you can use on any computer with Excel 2007 or later installed	Two at a time unless you pay more for the multiple user license
Modular Too	Yes, not only can you just input minimum data to run a simple modular report (e.g., college, life insurance needs, or net worth), but if you buy the IFP and then want just the stand-alone module, then you'll probably just get it for free by asking. For example, all fields with an asterisk need to be input into a NaviPlan before it will work. You could have completed a simple modular plan in the time it takes to do that	No, it's just one big program, so you'll need to buy and input more than what's Needed if you want to run a quick simple modular report
Ability to "Go Back in Time" (to input a plan, to see how things worked out in the current or a past year)	No	Yes
Accuracy of Numbers	Extreme, the best you can get anywhere	Very bad, not even "cash flow-based" so it doesn't account for pre-retirement surpluses or Deficits or replacements, nor does it calculate projected net worth
Dangerous Installation Procedure that May Wipe Out Windows (DLL) Files if They Screw Up (making a reload of Windows needed, which is more work than having to buy a whole new computer. Yes this kind of thing happens all the time with code - e.g., ExecPlan's free demo in '08)	No	No, cloud-based