Is MaxiFi the Right Financial Planning Tool For You?

Conventional planning software asks you to guess your future spending, and then tells you how likely it is that you run out of money. While this software makes claims to be ‘dynamic’ and ‘flexible’, in reality they assume your guesstimates are fixed for life — assuming you’ll stick to the same spending pattern no matter what.

Instead, MaxiFi uses the concept of consumption smoothing, factoring in income, taxes, assets, and fixed expenditures to calculate how much discretionary spending you can afford each year. In short, it helps you work out a sustainable lifetime budget that adjusts to your real-world circumstances.

Too many conventional personal financial planning tools assume that financial planning is something you do for your retirement. Instead, MaxiFi is built to support you at every stage of life, be it career changes, paying off debt, or retirement. From Social Security to Roth Conversions and decisions about property, MaxiFi gives you the information you need to make smart decisions.

How? MaxiFi makes conservative assumptions to show how each of these decisions affects your family’s future living standard. Where conventional tools give you a percentage chance of staying solvent, MaxiFi calculates the real impact on your affordable spending.

With conventional software tools, when you make even a simple change like contributing more to an IRA, the software assumes that your other spending stays the same. It takes your original inputs, keeps them as they were, and adjusts your percentage chance of staying solvent. But is that realistic? If your fixed expenditure goes down, for example, would you necessarily need to spend so much on life insurance? Finding the right spending level this way can mean hours of trial and error, manually adjusting your original target.

MaxiFi completes the same process in seconds, adjusting your discretionary spending level by recalculating your fixed spending — taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and insurance. Thus, every time you run a MaxiFi profile, you know all the results are internally consistent.

Around two thirds of US households face cash flow constraints at some point in their financial lives. With required minimum distributions for retirees pushed back to age 75, that problem may only grow. The trouble is, if you’re using conventional planning software, you have to endlessly adjust your spending assumptions to find a scenario where you don’t spend more cash than you have.

With its advanced algorithms, MaxiFi can do all that hard work for you and show you an affordable spending level adjusted so you’re always living within your means. The result is a clear, consistent level of spending across your lifetime.

Getting Social Security right and timing your retirement can make a difference worth tens of thousands of dollars. But conventional planning tools can make it hard to get right. These tools rely on fixed assumptions about your spending, so you have to keep going back and adjusting them to avoid results based on contradictions and inconsistencies.

MaxiFi works differently. Click the Maximization button to explore a range of Social Security, retirement, and Roth Conversion strategies and find the combination that works for you. Make adjustments, compare scenarios, and instantly see how it impacts your spending. MaxiFi automatically adjusts your spending, federal taxes, benefits, and Medicare Part B (IRMAA) premiums. That means far fewer manual changes needed.

When software tools make recommendations about life insurance, they assume that you need to cover the spending ‘needs’ you entered when you started out. But if you or your spouse dies, how many of those assumptions stay the same? Childcare, housing, and earnings, to name a few, could all change.

MaxiFi’s life insurance recommendations account for these changes and your actual spending needs, making them truly dynamic. MaxiFi Premium’s Contingent Planning not only accounts for changes in your spending requirements when a spouse passes away, it accounts for the cost of life insurance itself. That means you can create a clear, consistent plan for each contingency.

Because conventional tools assume you will spend your target amount regardless of how your assets perform, they stop you from simulating what you would actually do. If your assets underperform, you would probably reduce your spending. So, why would your financial planning tool show you anything else?

MaxiFi’s Full Risk Investing dynamically adjusts your spending level, showing you a range of trajectories for your living standard depending on how your assets perform and allowing you to compare outcomes depending on how aggressively you invest and spend. With Upside Investing, you can even set a ‘floor’ for your living standard, not just your income. That means you can make a plan where you sustain your basic living standard even if your investments badly underperform.