The Boulevard to Financial Independence

By Matt

One of the best features on Fidelity’s Retirement Quick Check is that it allows not just an individual, but also a couple to plan for retirement. This is key because your retirement funds need to last as long as the oldest person lives. For example, let’s say a husband (54 years old) and wife (48 years old) are planning for retirement. Let’s say that the couple wants to assume that the wife lives to be 4 years older than her husband. So if the husband effectively has to add 10 extra years of expenses for a single elderly person. It’s great that Fidelity takes this into account, since most tools ignore the fact that in retirement planning your forecasting for the oldest person.

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By Matt

Recently there were a couple articles that appeared in Kiplingers and the Wall Street Journal evaluating different online retirement planning tools, including:

• ChooseToSave.org (Free)
• ES Planner ($149-$199)
• Fidelity’s Retirement Quick Check (Free to registered Fidelity.com users)
• Financial Engines ($150-$300)

I asked two of the Independent Financial Advisors that are helping us to develop our next-generation retirement planning service and one of them came up with this analogy:

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By Matt

In talking with a leading behavioral economist yesterday about online advice tools and his research, we got onto the topic of why people are in such bad shape when it comes to retirement preparedness.

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