Fidelity Retirement Income Planner Hot
Editor's Picks
Fidelity RIP - Well Designed, Comprehensive Planner That Doesn't Make Your Brain Hurt
The Fidelity Retirement Income Planner is impressive in the comprehensiveness it can achieve while still guiding you the process rather painlessly, offering tips on how to properly input and estimate along the way. Great combination for the novice that wants it all. A small example of this is when you arrive at the expenses -- you can utilize Fidelity’s detailed spend worksheet if you are needing some help. Need help estimating future healthcare expenses? It will provide you with the averages and provide you with a detailed breakdown of what to expect in insurance costs.
Stand Out Features
2.) Tips boxes and Wizard process is exemplary at prompting you to properly consider all inputs, pointing out what-if scenarios and providing tips without getting in the way.
3.) Portfolio allows you to enter your specific assets down to the individual fund or stock level. I’m sure this helps them in suggesting better returns as well, but it also provides an additional level of detail as they do get assumption information from Morningstar to help assign the range of returns.
4.) Itemized details and reporting in a downloadable, user friendly format.
Potential Drawbacks
Last updated: May 02, 2012
#1 Reviewer - View all my reviews
Basic Tool Info
Your Investments
- Equity
- Short Term Bonds
- Long Term Bonds
Your Income
Other Important Factors
Comprehensive, easy to use and not a major time investment. You get a little bit of the best of all worlds with this planner.
Fidelity Retirement Income Planner Feature Details
Tool Ease of Use
Very simple to navigate and to toggle between sections.
Tool Wizards, Insights and Tips:
A running wizard helps you fill in your inputs, also includes an excellent summary page of all your inputs you can access and edit/add from as well. The Fidelity Retirement Income Planner also helps you navigate through LTC and other health costs - even providing some itemized averages for you that you can choose to go with, which is great since pre-retirees have yet to experience it and really have to rely on estimates.
Includes a helpful set of 'retirment health indicators' labeled as "Key Risks" that it assesses: Spending, Inflation, Market Risk, Health Care Costs, Planning for Longevity.
Tool Transparency:
A 24 page methodology document is provided detailing all assumptions that are made and how calculations are performed.
Your Investments:
Ability to enter allocation of stocks, bonds, short term and 'other' for each account, with the option to specify institution and individual stocks as well as specify specifics on payments if already taking distributions. There is also a set of fields to list other financial events such as lump sum, business sale, real estate sale, inheritance, annuity or pension as well. Performance analysis is based on a minimum of 250 historical market scenarios, with market volatility by asset class is based on annual data from 1926 onward - all surrounding assumptions are well detailed in their documentation.
Expect to be prompted for your risk tolerance and what actions you would likely take if the market performed a certain way in early retirement.
Your Income:
Covers all income types, including lump sum amounts such as inheritance and property sales, as well as the inclusion of pensions, annuities and reverse mortgage situations. Very flexible, with the ability to specify the timing and amount of payment streams efficiently and accurately.
Your Spending:
Covers a wide range of spending, including temporary expenses being input such as child college expenses, or your mortgage. One particularly nice feature allows you to break your expenses into discretionary and non-discretionary spending buckets allows you to see your flexibility at a glance when it's time to manage your results.
Prompts you for health care expenses and links to a pop-up to help estimate these if you aren't sure what would be appropriate.
Your Results:
Provides a chart that can be filtered to view data set in multiple ways, outlines shortfall or remaining funds at end of period and a link to a worksheet with the itemized detail for income and expenses, and cash flow for each year in question.
Other Important Factors:
Inflation, Taxes and Fees: Inflation assumed is 2.3%, but is configurable as a "what if" scenario at the end. State and Federal are calculated for you under current tax which is specified in assumptions and indexed for inflation each year, with option for self-entry of local.
Scenario Analysis: Provides plenty of prompts for possible what-if scenarios and easy access to modify multiple variables.
