 Welcome to episode number three of the Bogleheads Life Stages podcast. Bogleheads are investors who follow John Bogle's investing philosophy for attaining financial independence. Today's episode features Michelle Dash and Stephen Chen for New Retirement. This recording was made on April 7, 2021. This recording is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. I have Stephen Chen with me, the founder of New Retirement. Just giving us a little introduction of how New Retirement started and a little bit about the tool and where we're going, and then he'll turn things over to me. I have a couple screens up on my end and I will walk you through a live version of the demo. Okay, awesome. Hey everyone, appreciate your time and attention. I'll try to keep this really short because I know we're here to talk about a product and we welcome all feedback. So yeah, I'm the founder. Basically, this got started because I was trying to help my mom with her own retirement situation. She came by brother and I and her when she was in her early sixties and into borrow some money. And we looked around to try and get her advice and help from a financial advisor but couldn't really find anyone that focused on decumulation, or was interested with some in her situation because she had like her net worth was like maybe $250,000 including her home, which is more than half of it. So we ended up doing ourselves on spreadsheets and then a lot of it was expense management and looking at her whole life holistically so healthcare, social security, you know, which is you, you know, we ended up helping her downsize and freeing up a lot of home equity, and then helping her think through investing that and like should she annuitize and stuff questions like that. So, we felt like hey there's probably a really big need here, you know, given the size of the populations you know 120 million people over age 15 this country. And so we kind of set about building in and it started out as a kind of a side project and now it's become kind of full blown, full blown big effort I mean we have 22 people so we're still relatively small company but solely focused on this platform and you know helping people think through decumulation and give them a central low cost free or low cost way to manage themselves. So that's kind of how it got started. You know, really the way we think about this is we're building a platform. So it's not just tool but it's really a way to, you know, create like an enable an ecosystem so we, we have the tool. We have to be around it we have a bunch of educational content around it. In the future, we do want to enable people to be able to find curated experts that can help them, but in a completely transparent way so we are paid by our customers, and no one else so people can pass through subscribing, or they can hire us to coach them up, or we can provide CFP advice but on a flat fee basis like a coach coaching sessions like 150 bucks an hour, or 45 minutes, you know we'll do a flat fee plan review for 1000 bucks, that's it. You know there's no AOM or anything else wrapped up in this. But because it's software enables us to go, you know through partners at a very low cost in a very low cost way so we're talking to employers and media companies and there's some stuff coming down the pipe that way. We're talking about where we're going. So today it's really like you can think of as like a turbo tax for planning. So it's like you just do it all yourself you know people with knobs and levers and you can see what's coming and how your plan might change. And then where we're going is, you know, we're looking at the data at an aggregate level and like what's working to achieve better outcomes for our partners or sorry for our users. We're surfacing things that are relevant to that for them. So for example, we're about to roll out social security optimization that will run 12,000 simulations for an end user to say hey we look at your plan, all of your income expenses, taxes, you know, future withdrawals, conversions Roth conversions stuff like that and here's how you might be able to get more money from social security. So we can do that users can initiate that what we can also do is run it automatically behind the scenes for 155,000 people on surface like hey, it looks like there's an opportunity for you, Michelle to do this and pointed out for them proactively. So we are going to automate Roth conversions, which you'll see demonstrated here but we can do that social security optimizations I mean essentially anything around planning will be able to proactively do for you in advance and at least won't do it but like surface like hey there might be an opportunity here that you haven't thought about so that's like a little bit about how we think a little bit differently about this. And we are sucking in lots of data behind the scenes if people decide to opt in for that if you would decide to link accounts. Yeah, if you want to go back one slide for real quick and I'll then I'll be quiet, you know, basically, you know, completely independent platform consumer focused. You know, we have this platform technology first approach. And that's, I think, you know, kind of what differentiates differentiates us from other, other companies. Anyway, sorry if this was too salesy but I just want to give you the quick overview. I'll turn it back to Michelle. Okay, so there's a few more slides I just want to walk you through kind of the key stats of like what what we do is Steve mentioned, you know the way we get paid is by consumers, and that really helps us stay unbiased. We have different levels of the program. There's a free version it's always free. You know it's really meant for people who want to see if they're on track. We have limited functionality in terms of assumptions and some of the more advanced schools and charting that Steve was mentioning the planner plus option it's about 100 bucks a month a little bit less. And this is going to unlock all of the charts that we have all those projections, lots of suggestions and everything that you see in the demo today. And on top of that we have planner plus live which is, you know, the planner plus service as well as a couple coaching sessions. And then we have the option for advisor so we're really trying to, you know, provide something for everyone at every stage of their financial planning journey. You come in the tool and we'll look at all this live. The first thing you do is you work on your plan. So you want to go in you want to make sure that, you know, check the dashboard, see how you're doing, and then go back refine your plan add more detail, make it as accurate as possible. And then you can use our coach suggestions which is like an automated rule engine to help figure out what's going on with your plan where there are areas where you can improve where there are areas that you can learn about strategies that you didn't know about. And if you have some inaccuracies in your plan or assumptions that are no different than averages or historical averages, then we're just going to let you know. If you create a plan, then, you know, there's a lot of different places where you can find optimizations. So we just actually are we want today the insights library, which is just an overview of all the different charts that we have so this is like the overview of that. And then Steve mentioned we have a Roth Explorer, which kind of helps you figure out the optimal estate value, the optimal savings for your state by doing Roth conversions earlier in your plan. We also have like what we really want to do is we want you to stress test your plan. Right. So we want you we're giving you a platform to create a plan but we don't want you to just create one plan. We want you to create a plan and then experiment with what its scenarios and think about all the different things that can happen along the way because it's, you know, it's impossible to plan for, you know, a year from now let alone 20 or 30 years from now. But what we can do is think through potential outcomes and have rough ideas of what we would do in different situations and really plan for them in a time where we're not stressed out or need to make any split second decision. Another thing I wanted to bring to everyone's attention is that we have a lot of free communities, free webinars and free education. So I leave most of the demos, the I lead office hours to get questions about the tool. You can have a webinar every couple weeks. I answer questions live. I go through different demos. We also sponsor anything events with hot leaders from like all different parts of the financial industry. So all of that is free because, you know, our goal is really dedicated and learning about opportunities and strategies that can help them with financial wellness. We also have a Facebook group. We have almost 4000 people in it right now. It's extremely dynamic. A lot of you are already members. You have a lot of great conversation about withdrawal strategies, news articles, how to use the tool, what assumptions people use. So it's a great place to collaborate and be able to plan with others and learn from others experience because retirement is something that most of us only do one time. And then finally, we've mentioned a couple of times that we have additional services. So you can certainly schedule live appointments to review your plan for accuracy or for just help understanding some of the charts. I run most of those sessions. And then we also have a CFP in house who will help you with your plan and we really try to keep this low cost and we're able to do that because we're really leveraging our technology form to do that. So any questions before I get started with the demo. Okay. So the first thing I want to take everyone through is the onboarding process. Here you're going to start the plan. You have an option to go through a quick version or a comprehensive version. Tonight I'm going to go through the quick version just to give you a sense of the types of questions that are in the onboarding process. So we're going to ask you a little bit about yourself. If you're married and have a spouse. We're going to ask you generally about your household income. What you think your social security estimates are. How much you have in savings at a very high level because once you go into the plan you'll have an opportunity to refine it and add more assumptions. We're going to ask if you have a pension. If you own your home or it. And then we ask also about medical expenses and you know your other monthly expenses or, you know the things that you're paying for on a monthly or an annual basis. When you finish up you're going to go to a dashboard and I'm actually going to switch to my demo account here. And you're going to land on the dashboard page. And you're here. The first thing you might notice is your scorecard. So we're going to give you a score this is represents the ratio of income to expenses. And it's just kind of one indicator that's letting you know how are you doing are you on track to have enough income to cover your expenses. And also giving you the current net worth based on the information that you entered into your plan, your average monthly retirement income, your end estate value so how much you're projected to have at longevity age, and if your savings are going to run out. Okay, I recommend that you come back to these key indicators as you're making updates to your plan, because they kind of benchmark where you start versus where you end up after you, you know spend some time revising your plan. Adding detail or doing what if scenarios. This main chart on the dashboard is called the lifetime retirement projections chart. Hey, I like to call it the story of retirement, because what it's doing is it's showing us how our income is going to cover expenses over time. So we start today here in 2021, and we're looking out at our income so all the columns represent income. We have different ways of sources of income whether it's work social security annuities pensions. And then we also count income as income that we're pulling out of our savings accounts. So 401ks over taking withdrawals in the future. We're considering that part of your income for retirement. The blue line that goes through this chart that represents expenses. So anytime you see the columns above the blue line that means you have more income coming in than expenses in a given year. Also on this page we're showing you your whole plan highlights but what I really want to do is show you all of the different areas of my plan that we can customize. So when I look at my plan we kind of break it up into a lot of categories with goals, income social security annuities and pensions savings and assets withdrawals. We're going to just fly through some of these sections. I'm basic profiling goals, asking for your single or married filing status for your structure in the plan. I'm also asking you for your longevity age of you and your spouse if you have one. So we know how long we want your plan to be funded. The next thing I want to show you is work and other income. This is where we're going to enter any kind of earned income that you have. The nice thing about this section is it's really flexible, you know, not only do you put in what your current income is, you can model that in the future so I'm going to be earning income from now through age 60. So if you're someone who is thinking about modeling, you know, a sabbatical or retiring early, or maybe, you know, one spouse wants to stay home with kids. You're easily able to model different ranges of work times, which can be really powerful when you're thinking through, you know, your scenario for your long term projections. So I want to call attention over here to your updates. So all of these charts are going to update in real time. You have the option to look at a chart to see if your savings will run out, your savings balances over time, that same income versus expenses chart. You can look at your score or your taxes. So it's really helpful to toggle through these different charts, depending on what screen you're on and what supporting information that you have. It's really helpful, all this updates in real time so I change my monthly income to $20,000. We're going to see that my income protected income went up in real time. So it had a big increase. Also on this page you have the ability to model passive income. Most people use this to model income from rental property. The option gets into detail about social security. So we ask you to enter in your social security based on your full retirement age. And that's so we can separately give you the option to choose when you want to claim social security. So you have the option to claim, you know, early or to delay until when you're 70. As Steve mentioned, we will be coming out with a social security explorer tool to help you dig deeper into some of those lifelong benefits and how you can optimize your planning strategy. Social security is one area where we do allow you to model assumptions separately so you can separately enter the cost of living appreciation for social security. Yeah, I will demo rock and text modeling. Absolutely. The next section is annuities and pensions so you have the ability if you already own an annuity you know the cash flow you can put that in here. If you're thinking about purchasing an annuity in the future whether it's an immediate or deferred annuity, you can put that here and entering all the information. You also can model pensions. We have two different types of pensions. So we have a monthly pension with when you know your cash flow, and we have a lump sum pension when you're expecting to receive a lump sum value we let you select the destination account for where that goes. This section can be particularly helpful. If you're thinking about how you should take your pension whether you should take it in a lump sum, or whether you should take it over time. One scenario that uses the monthly pension, another scenario that uses the lump sum, and then you're able to see how that affects your overall financial picture far into the future. The next section is savings and assets. So here we have this is where we might model all of our account information. This first topic is about tax deferred accounts, both retirement income and other accounts. Here we see that in this example we have a 401k. We also have a Roth 401k and a Roth IRA. The spouse has a 529 plan set up for children, a former 401k and HSA plan, and then we also have a catch all for other pre tax. The account type is really interesting because when you make contributions to these accounts based on the type, it's going to assume the tax treatment on the contribution and the withdrawal. So when I make a contribution to a Roth account, it's going to know that it's taxed on the way in. And when I make a withdrawal from the Roth account, it's going to know not to tax at all. On the page we also ask about other savings. So this is cash savings, whether it's in, you know, a bank account or a brokerage account. When you select capital gains treatment, that means that all the withdrawals coming out of this account are going to be taxed at a long term capital gains rate, instead of that ordinary income. As long as you enter the cost basis, the proportional amount of growth will be taxed at the long term gains rate. So very important to enter in the cost basis. We let you model contributing to different accounts. So as you have new income coming in, if you want to direct it towards different savings goals, whether that's your 401k or HSA, you can certainly do that here. And then if you're expecting a lump sum or an inherent inheritance, a windfall, we allow you to add after tax contributions at a certain point in time in the future. Hopefully on this page you can model if you have like cash value for business, you have collectibles or other assets. This section in particular, it's included in your net worth, but it's not considered liquid cash flow so it's not included in most of the calculations. When we think about withdrawal strategy and our liquid cash. Also on this page and I'm scrolling back up is an area for Roth conversions. I know that's a big topic for everybody in this group. When I think about Roth conversions, I really like to look at taxes. So I'm going to toggle to the tax area and click on the federal. So here on this chart, we're able to see our projected tax liability broken down by tax bracket between now and the end of our plan. So you can see that in the future, like right now I'm working I'm in the 22% tax bracket in the future because of all the growth and the good savings that I'm doing I might be in the 24% tax bracket. So that means that I could be eligible for Roth conversions as part of my strategy, and you're able to model that here. So I see that I have a tax window. I started filling this out and as I enter in more information for the conversion amount converting from my 401k into a Roth IRA account. You can see in real time that we're adding tax liability, but we're also reducing our future tax liability. The area in red on that chart is going to continue to slightly decrease as we're moving our tax liability forward. So using this chart and this section of the tool together to really experiment with a Roth conversion strategy on a Roth conversion letter can be really powerful. You can also kind of see here that it is telling you on each click of the button, whether your lifetime tax liability has increased or decreased, as well as showing you up here your lifetime liability so adding in all of your tax liability between now and the end of your plan. Over on the topic of withdrawals. I'm going to talk about the withdrawal section next. So, in the toy model, several different withdrawal strategies, the based on spending needs strategy assumes that you're modeling exactly what you put into the plan. If your expenses exceed your income, then you're going to start withdrawing from some of your accounts. So the tool actually has in order of operations for how we do this. We always take withdrawals from new income, then we take withdrawals from taxable then tax deferred then Roth and HSA. So this strategy right here is not necessarily showing you which account it's coming from. It's just showing you if it's taking a withdrawal from your accounts to meet your expenses modeled in the tool. Okay, the blue is representing your RMDs, your required minimum distributions. And as we make changes in the tool and change our expenses, or bring forward withdrawals, your RMDs will change and update in real time as well. We have two other withdrawal strategies that you can model. Maximum spending is actually the opposite of spending needs. When you're taking out only the expenses modeled in your plan, maximum spending is actually taking out. It's reducing your plan. It's running an optimization to say, what if I wanted to deplete my assets for the entire plan by my longevity age. So I want to deplete my assets by longevity. How much can I take out every single year to maximize my spending and my enjoyment of my money throughout time. So from here, you're able to set the date of when you want that to start, and then experiment with how much money you can take out. So this can really help you have more comfort when making decisions. If you're thinking about, you know, can I afford to go on vacation or can I afford to buy an RV or a second home. We also have a fixed percent withdrawal strategy that kind of uses the 4% rule. So we calculate 4% of your portfolio and inflate that over time and use that strategy for your withdrawals. For expenses, we have lots of different ways to model expenses. So you can just put in your monthly expenses. You can model it by different phases of time. So maybe, you know, before retirement, after retirement, maybe you're more into early retirement, mid retirement and later retirement. So this can be really helpful. If you want to have a more detailed budget and do wine item modeling, then we have a planner plus a budget or where you can enter in all of these expenses. You can also take advantage of the ability to create multiple budgets, one for your basic expenses and one for more discretionary expenses so that you can match these up to your pessimistic or your optimistic assumptions. Next, we can model our real estate. So whether your primary residence is, you know, you own it outright, you have a mortgage or you rent, you can model that here. And we'll calculate the mortgage payments for you. The most important part of this section is putting in the zip code of your primary residence because that's going to actually determine your state tax structure. For Roth conversions, we looked at federal tax structure. For this section, I want to look at state tax structure. So living in California, it's a very high tax state. We can see in the future while I'm working, there's a lot of taxes, as well as when I'm taking RMDs, there's also a lot of taxes. So one thing we can do is, you know, model a change to our primary location. Maybe we're thinking about relocating to Florida or Washington or Texas, a lower tax state. So in this case, in this scenario, I'm thinking about, okay, at 65, I'm retired, I'm going to sell my primary home, and I'm going to buy a home in Florida. Okay, and when I look at this chart, I now can visually see the difference that I'm saving in taxes, which is pretty neat. So if you're, you know, thinking about moving, this is a great thing to experiment with. You know, if you have other properties, you can also enter those, and then you can also model purchasing or selling real estate in the future. So we're not limiting you to just what you own now. We really want you to be modeling everything because we want to show your whole financial picture. In terms of medical, we have a couple calculations. We want you to model your expenses before Medicare, and then we will estimate your Medicare cost based on a variety of different combinations of policies. Well, this is really neat because if you say, you know, you smoke, we're going to increase your estimate, this uses Medicare's API, so all the information is up to date. If you have other medical conditions, you're going to see your costs increase. Of course, these are estimations. When you use estimate projected Medicare expenses, it will add in Irma, if that is something that you're subjected to. So the additional amount of Medicare fees that you have to pay if you're above a certain adjusted gross income. And lastly, we do a model long term care. You can often see that spike towards the end of your plan in terms of expenses. That little spike is for long term care. It's based on your longevity age, and it kicks in three years before your longevity age. So that's kind of the big overview of things that you can do in the tool. After you go through all of your plan, you get all your information really accurate. So we recommend that you do a few things. We recommend that you go to coach suggestions. This is going to run through your plan, and it's going to actually generate a series of rules that are going to help you. So if you have gone through and created made adjustments to your plan, these are going to change. So if you looked at it at the beginning as we did, you want to come back here to see if there are any changes. So I think I'll pause here, and maybe start taking questions. Michelle question for you. I was trying to solve some user technical issues so I might have missed if you talked about it. I'm just wondering about any incorporations of the recent rules for like the eight and a half percent health care and its effect on the subsidy or premium tax credit on the ACA stuff. I know ACA is not included that is something that you'd have to manually adjust for is in our plans to add sometime later in the year. Okay, thank you. I think you mentioned to that. I think you said $100 a month when I think you meant to say $100 a year when you went on the slide with the, with the costs. That's the membership cost or the signup cost. Yeah, it's, it's, it's we charge $8 a month, but we charge it annually so it's $96 a year. And that's, yeah, that's an annual fee. And then someone was asking we do have a 14 day trial where you can try out everything she's showing you. And if you decide to cancel in the 14 days we do ask for credit card upfront but we will never charge you. We are like, you know, this is the challenge we have really it's like what's what's interesting is we see, you know, traditional, not both those people but you know many folks they go to wealth advisors and help pay 1% of their million bucks $10,000 a year. And they're fine with it. But then if you're like, oh it's it's $100 for this they're like wait, but I'm paying, you know, it's just a psychological difference that we see. We review tools you know somebody say, we have this free tool but the other ones $5 for 400 features and they they bought at the $5 so it's amazing to me when talking about the money you're talking about here. People say, you know their savings. There's a question is the plan in the demo, a reasonable one. And is it looks like having huge incomes, like greater than 500 grand a year in the later years while spending very little in the early years, or is just the first cut applying suggested improvements. Yeah, so the this plan is very heavy and assets. So you want to take advantage of all of the different areas and also want to be able to show rock conversions in a very visual way. So in order to do that, I did inflate the assets of savings and assets to give this person very large 401k and tax deferred balances. Okay. Could you talk a little bit about your privacy policy. All of our data is encrypted. And we use like bank level security, where we go through constant iterations of, you know, taking security audits and risk measures. And our security policy is on our website. It's been validated we have a privacy policy in terms of use. We use a third party group called trust arc that reviews it every year. And we're also running our own security penetration tasks and kind of auditing ourselves and in fact I mean one interesting thing is, we also have members of our community we actually have a member of our community right now who's a recently retired security expert who's like hey listen I want to help you out. I mean one thing that we see is actually our audience is full of very smart people who are super interested in this or helping us out. And so, you know, where it makes sense will definitely collaborate with folks, but we take it super seriously we know that it's, you know we were holding people's, you know, super important information. So another way, one of the thought on this is we did actually purposely construct the tool so that you do put an email into creating account but we don't ask for your full name, your phone number, your address, or anything else. And if you don't want to link accounts you can just do it manually so you end up with, you know, you could semi anonymize you know, you know, where your accounts, what your account names are, and then roughly put in your account values. Anyway, that much information so we did that on purpose, but you can link accounts if you want to and we work with plaid, who's our, you know, data account linking provider they power many of the top sites out there for most of them. Thank you. There's another question out there about state text intricacies and the detail that required at the state level compared to the federal level. How do you deal with the states. So we try to keep the state data as up to date as possible. So it does correlate with all our different account types of contributions and withdrawal going in withdrawals coming out. We update everything once a year. I mean, and one of this is this also goes back to learning with our community we do hear, especially when we first rolled this out, you know, we'll hear from like a teacher. This is a true, true case you know in like New York and they'll say hey, my teachers pension is federally taxed but not state tax because it's a state pension and so we'll actually adapt the platform to handle that edge case. So we, you know, this, we do have to continually upgrade the plot, update the platforms the projection stay as accurate as possible and then we'll also shape it based on what we're hearing from live users, you know, we have thousands of users every day on this platform. And could you speak to the, let's say the architecture of the system like is it in the cloud or where is it not in your basement I hope but it is on the cloud. We actually did use to run our own data center way back but it's all in the cloud and you know we use industry standard best practices I mean it's built to scale. I mean one thing you'll see is when you're using tool like we're running thousands of my Carlo simulations behind the scenes we have built the platform to be able to run. So our future vision so there's 150,000 people have created plants, you know, in the not too distant future we want to tax that to go to one and a half million people. We want to be able to run thousands of simulations per user on a regular basis. So this will be, you know, billions of simulations we're running all the time. So we have architected the system, and then you'll see it's pretty responsive and fast to, to do that. And I believe that planning can help not just people in the US when we have like people from India, Europe all over the world using this thing that it can help, you know, planning and education in a completely aligned way can help hundreds of millions of people. I mean there's seven billion people on this planet, a billion people have money, you know, and more are going to get it as globalization happens and they need to make good financial decisions. And so we're going to represent the top, you know, point 001% of financially educated people. And in a deal future we would leverage these kinds of communities to help other people that are much earlier in the education curve. You know, to make good choices for the whole lives. When you, Michelle when you showed us those recommendations, after you put in the rough cut plan you went into a screen that had like six or eight recommendations. What are your experiences with all your users. What are the most common recommendations that people are missing that they should should be doing the suggestions from the coach let's say in a bulk bulk with all your users and what you guys have seen. So we run this across, you know, over 100 different rules and regulations. So, almost everybody we recommend review your plan with your spouse, you know, socialize it, talk about it uses as a opportunity to talk about values, especially with someone who's not quite as interested in money because usually the person who's super interested and makes this their hobby is the one filling out this plan. So we'll also run different calculations to see, you know, oh, this is out of average, or, you know, you missed an input. Often people will forget to put in medical expenses before Medicare. That's a very common one. Sometimes people will forget to put in a zip code in home and real estate, which is really important to take advantage of the more detailed state tax regulations. So we'll run a lot of like scenarios to say, you know what you've selected to withdraw money before your 59 and a half there might be a penalty. Now we don't model that what the penalty would be, but we do try to alert you of any potential risks in your plan. So you know where to investigate further. I think you may have mentioned it but do you take care of the earner surcharge on the high income. Look, look back for Medicare. So we definitely take care of Irma in the background it's part of your medical assumption when you think about medical estimates. You know one thing I didn't show or a lot of the insights charts. Once you enter your accurate plan, then we have all these charts that show very, very detailed assumption so here we're looking at the projections of estimated income and estimated expenses. When we look at just this blue or our lifetime medical expenses. You know this is inclusive of all your premiums, all your co pays long term care insurance or month, everything is all wrapped in these and then you can click on any year to kind of freeze it in time for that year. And that when I'm 77 it's telling me exactly what my medical projections may be. And then these are all in the future dollars. Michelle there was a question earlier and I, I don't know if you covered it I stepped away for a minute asked about if there was a spot for real estate taxes obviously we have people from around the country with vastly different property taxes is there a spot for that in there. Yeah, so one thing that we do is we ask for, you know your current home value. And, you know, then we estimate what you might sell it for, but we actually don't calculate the tax because so many people do customize strategies with depreciation 1031 exchanges. So what we do recommend is that you kind of figure out what you think that your tax liability will be, you know, based on what you bought the house for we don't ask for that. And then put that amount in expenses modeled as an expense because that's going to make your plan a little more accurate. Thank you. So one thing that I didn't show is the Roth conversion Explorer. So, Steve has mentioned this a few times. It's actually an engine that's been looking at your plan and calculating thousands of different combinations to try to figure out what strategy for Roth conversions is going to generate the largest estate at longevity. So this ran through my plan, and it's projecting that, you know, if I do Roth conversions, I might have over $2 million more at the end of my plan or my longevity. It's going to give me a year to convert each age, what account and the amount that it should come from. So right now this tool is separate from the plan so you actually have to manually enter it in your plan. But what this does is it really like gives you a starting point for your strategy, and it helps you think about it in, you know, a way that is very hard to calculate on your own, because it's including all of the different aspects of our plan it's including new income coming in it's including taxes, including Irma, it's including you know how your expenses change from year to year. And it's pretty neat. As I scroll down the page you can actually see the comparison of taxes between the plan that you have modeled and the plan in the Explorer so you kind of notice that, you know with your current plan, you're paying less taxes up front, but then it kind of switches and in the future, the Roth optimized plan you're paying less taxes. And this is actually one place where we do expose Irma. So you are looking for that you can see it here that in the optimized plan by doing those conversions earlier for a long period of time in the future you're actually reducing your Irma surcharge completely. Michelle we have also a question about, can we handle income from an escort or not all income is tax the same way. So for real estate and escorts the way that we recommend doing it is instead of putting in the gross amount that you put in the profit amount in as income. That's where we are today. Michelle I think there was a question earlier about changes in asset allocation through time. Could you speak to that a little bit a little bit more. Yeah. So, what we do right now is. The right page on the savings and assets page, you know, we asked for two different values and optimistic and a pessimistic growth rate. And that's so you know you can toggle between these you'll see your whole plan update in real time, depending if you choose optimistic or pessimistic. pessimistic growth rates are how we mirror the asset allocation that's actually in this account. So when I look at my 401k and I see a growth rate of 8% 5% I think it's invested in growth stocks. Now, today this represents over like the same value every single year. So you really want to choose a value that is like a rolling average, not necessarily representative of, you know, just a couple years you want to think about the entire time span. I used to kind of override it and kind of shift money into another account, if you really want to completely change your asset allocation in general just recommend that you pick a happy medium that is representative of the entire life span of your. What they're asking for is, you know, I'm 45 and I don't mind being 100% of the stock market by the time I get to be 65 I want to be 50% in the market. And by the time I'm 80 I want to be 90% in bonds or something like that I think that's the idea making updates to asset allocation to include that functionality and some other stuff around just being able to pick growth funds I'm in bonds and make these projections a lot easier. In general this tool is super flexible, and there's definitely a work around for everything. So today the work around for completely shifting your asset is to actually just like create a second temporary plan that will be in the future. And then manually transfer the balance into that new account using our manual withdrawal and transfer area, and then you're able to kind of in the future shift the money, and then it starts growing at a different rate that might be more conservative. I mean, to be fair, I mean we are definitely we're hearing this from other people too so we are working on a UX redo of this whole section to make it simpler to do what we're hearing from users which one of them is like hey I will, I'm planning on essentially de-risking my portfolio as I get older. We have any other questions you can put them in the chat. Let's go one more chart. So I didn't show this yet. This is pretty nifty. It's our tax projection chart. So we've looked at some of these values already as a small chart but this is a much larger chart. This is showing you your projections for estimated taxes. It's showing you the actual like source of the tax of how we're figuring it out. We're also showing your tax deductions, whether you're taking a standard deduction, or you're able to kind of benefit from some other information. And then at the bottom we have this larger chart again that's showing the different tax brackets. Something crazy is going on with this chart, but normally it shows standard deductions. I have a question about modifying values. Yeah, we basically restricted planner to limit the changing of rates and that's only available in plus. But again, you can, I mean, if you really want to, you know, not pay anything, you can go, you can sign up for plus but a credit card and change everything, print your plan, cancel, and you'll have a complete plan and we'll also save the data. What you'll lose is the ability to make changes in the future and kind of manage it over time. And we have had some users game us where they're like, I'll do that, cancel, come back a year later, sign up, cancel. Well, I mean, really, like we're trying to build a business that does this in a very different way, but we can only do it if, you know, use if the model works at scale, like we get enough users that support how we're trying to do business. Michelle, there's a question about about tax rate assumptions and you know future tax rates changing or sunsetting. I don't know, maybe talk about how that would be modified or such in there. So the tax structure that we use is today's current tax structure, and that's used for the duration of the plan. So we use today's tax structure for today and in the future. We do get a lot of requests to, you know, be able to model the projected the potential change in 2026 and even change be able to adjust to make the future have a higher tax rate. So it's something that we're thinking about and considering we know it's a highly desired feature. Thank you and then there was a question there about matching an advisor with a client how do you do that do you have any criteria for that. We're talking a lot about our service model right now and Michelle actually in addition to like managing and doing all these demos and everything else run services for us so we today we have a very limited, you know, we have advisors internally, but we are looking at making this available to through other advisors, you know that offer at least flat fee and completely transparent pricing. And there's no users can definitely take this and many of them do. They sign up themselves and they have an advisor, and they share it with their advisor either the printed version or they collaboratively do it with them, we are going to be making collaborative planning. We do it internally, but we'll make that easier for the user to control, or they can grant access to other people if they want to. So we'll see that evolve over the course of this year, where we're not really I mean our main focus is the software and supporting, you know, the user base and changing it very quickly. Our expertise is not building, you know, a giant CFP network. I'm one of the screens you talked about re re factoring the UX for asset allocation things. Could you just tell us about that process when you get a bunch of requests on the same thing you guys decide to go down the path and make the changes. And how does that actually happen and then how do you test that what you did and didn't blow up other things and, and how do you roll it out. Sure. So we've, you know, our team has grown, we basically doubled in the past year. And we did get a little institutional funding, but we're still relatively lightly funded company. You know, we've raised a total of $5 million was company which is like nothing compared to like a personal capital that's raised $250 million, which is good because we're focused on keeping our costs low and keeping our infrastructure costs were super low so that we can keep our prices low. But basically, yeah, we hear from users. Well, we do a lot of support so Michelle's team does all the intercom chat support so here you can use that way, office hours, AMAs you know we're we definitely are listening to users all the time, and seeing, you know where they what they want. And then we have a roadmap that where we're decking up. And this is what users want this is where we think the product needs to go. We design those things we use a, you know, some various back office testing platforms so we can test the UX we also have a beta program which you can sign up your part of and certain features you'll see are marked as beta so if you're in the beta program there's actually two levels. There's like hey you have to be part of the beta program to even see it and then we'll make something beta and but publicly available but it's still markers beta because it's still being worked on. So, you know, we kind of roll it out in phases. Okay, thank you. And just to answer your testing questions and accuracy questions I mean we do a lot of, so we write unit tests for the software, we can run simulation so like what we this past quarter we created the ability to run us we actually used to run forecast locally on your machine. Now we run them server side. So, like for instance we're rolling out some changes to our scoring methodology right now. So we are running scores for hundreds of thousands of people behind the scenes or accounts behind the scenes to make sure that the changes that we're doing as a way to kind of like test them all at once. I mean this is all kept internal but we basically run simulations and unit tests at scale today behind the scenes in order to kind of like see how are these changes affecting people's plans. Okay, there's a couple more questions in the chat. Is the plan model the indexing of the standard deduction and tax bracket. Basically does it assume the top of the 22% bracket in 20 years is the same dollar amount as today, or does it go up by some amount. We increase the brackets and the deductions the rates stay the same. And those increase based on your inflation rate that you put in. So we model a point in out that you can model the social security inflation rate you can also model home and real estate separately medical inflation separately, and then a general inflation rate for expenses. And so the taxes increased with the general inflation rate that you've modeled. And here's the question. Do you see the question there about the MFJ. First, well, the other part of that question was about standard deductions and itemized. So the tool actually go through and only if you use the budget or for expenses. It will calculate whether or not it thinks you're better off itemized taxes or standard deduction. And within the budget you can actually set different items to be tax deductible. So if you're making charitable gifts, or you know you're taking right business or other purposes, property taxes, it will factor that into your tax calculation. Here I'll take the question about Monte Carlo and income I miss typed in there so basically, we want to, you know, we're rolling out Monte Carlo for every investable asset class that has risk, and giving users more and more control over that and then, you know, we're rolling out Monte Carlo.