EvolveMyRetirement Avaliações 36

Not very user friendly. Recommendations unrealistic. Waste of an hour filling in, and now you have my data.

This is a really first class program. The huge number of simulations it runs inspires confidence that its conclusions are accurate.
I would prefer some further explanation/clarity around certain areas. Eg a full description of the thinking behind the figures selected for Discretionary Spending. Not everyone who might use the program fully understands statistical jargon.

It seems a comprehensive system that includes all the details required including partner's. BUT, the output document and figures do not make sense what so ever! You suggest that we continue to save a huge amount of money into our pension once retired, you gives £61k disposable income, 3x more than what we currently spend, not sure what level of tax we'd pay at that level of withdrawal, but this seems excessive, so overall we are very disappointed with the outcome

Bit complicated

I have tried out a number of retirement planners including expensive professional ones such as Voyant and Timeline and to be honest I have found that this does everything I want and better than even the professional tools for a lot of the functionality. Once you've run through it once it is very easy to get the hang of and any questions are very quickly answered by their customer services if you do have any issues. Best of all, the majority of the functionality is free, although I pay for the standard membership which is only around £20/year and gives a bit more flexibility. I will probably upgrade to the full premium membership when I retire as it is still only £50/year. I think this has probably saved me a few hundred or even thousands of pounds to do exactly what a professional financial advisor would initially do with any new client. I will now be able to retire within a couple of years with confidence that my finances will not run out. One thing to note, which applies to any tool or visit to a financial advisor, you really do need to know what your current and future expenses are so it's worth going back through your last years bank statements and totting up everything and putting into categories ... makes life so much simpler.

I had fun playing with this retirement model but in the end got a bit frustrated that the model increases discretionary spend and you can't reduce it without subscribing.
In any case a lot of fun!

I return to this tool once a year or more, mainly to get a second opinion after speaking to my advisor. I get comfort from the "you'll be fine 99.5%" of the time message, as opposed to the more common "we use these three rates of return" you normally get. I like to flick through random scenarios and it's interesting to see how they can vary. Just need to stay alive long enough...

Its an interesting tool, but it's quite difficult to determine exactly what the graphs etc are telling you. I guess what most people want to know is given their assests and spending, a good certainty of how much they can spend in retirement and outlive their resources, leaving/not leaving an inheritence. Each time you want to change a key criteria you have to use a "credit" . It really isn't designed to allow you to play with a whole heap of scenarios, without quickly starting to pay for each one.

Also if you make a mistake, it's a credit to correct it and redo the analysis. For example i had inserted my state pension start, but I didn't save it and had to redo the member info and forgot it. So realising it, I put it in again. Cost 1 credit. Analysis still didn't look right and then I realised i'd put in the weekly figure when the system wanted the yearly figure....another credit.

In my case, I told it leaving an inheritance was only 15% important, but each time the median amount left after i die is £400K. if I want to try to lower that % importance and thus increase my annual spending %....it's another credit ! Now I imagine a lot of that is the value of my property which I said not to sell. I guess I should take the property out completely to see what the final inheritance is, but that will another credit !

Also the strategy variables have a mind of their own. for example I set a target taxable income of 39K, but it is now at 2K. Also, when you lock items, they should stay locked, but no after a strategy, they are all unlocked again. Makes it more difficult to just lock or unlock, or change just 1 variable.

I only have the free version at present. This only gives a high level overview of how our retirement may pan out.

However the insights are still very helpful.

I can see us paying so we get extra functionality and being able to edit the strategies and tweak the settings.

Give the free version a go. You have literally nothing to lose apart from a little time inputting the financial information that the programme needs to do its stuff.

Then if you feel the output is helpful, pay the small annual fee to get a deeper dive into your retirement prospects.

Really useful tool. Had a tech glitch which was pointed out to me rather than the other way around. Have a credit in lieu. Great service.

I've bought it as an individual, and I've only used the tool 3 times so far, so probably too early to give an accurate or fair assessment. I was hoping to plug in my numbers and get a projection of what I could spend each year to avoid running out of funds. That's not what you get. You input your planned spend, essential and discretionary, and the legacy you want to leave, and it projects the likelihood of that being successful. In my case, I was left with a huge legacy, even though I'd set the legacy requirement to zero.

It allows you to input figures for yourself and your partner, but be careful to check it has the correct values set for each person before using a credit. Our first credit was wasted. The report generated had somehow copied my partner's birth date across onto my record, so the data generated was garbage.

There appears to be lots of configurable settings, which aren't immediately obvious, so I'm hopeful the projection I'm after is achievable. I'll need to play with it some more. It's just a shame the default projection isn't what, I would guess, most people are probably looking for.

To be fair, at the price point for the 'Standard' or 'Premium' package, I shouldn't complain!

I have been using this tool for several years as I consider my options in the critical last few years of work before retirement.

My wife and I have quite a complex set of investments and pensions between us and this is all modelled in the tool. We wanted to make sure we were optimising payments into pensions and isas

I have used all of the alternative tools that I can find (and I looked hard) including several saas tools, spreadsheets and the financial planning tools offered by financial organisations. This is by far the best.

I recently paid for a review with a financial advisor. He looked at my plans, based on all the scenarios I had modelled in the tool and told me he couldn’t really give me any better advice. He wasn’t able to find anything we needed to change. He said we didn’t really need his help. He did run us through the commercial software that is available to financial advisors but the results were the same as we had modelled in evolvemyretirement.

I used the tool to figure out that I can retire 2 years earlier than I was previously planning with enough money to really enjoy those extra 2 years.

I have had multiple conversations with Nick and he has been super helpful both in answering questions and in taking feedback on how to improve the tool. The tool now has several enhancements that I asked for.

I intend to keep using this tool as I navigate the transition to retirement over the next few years.

Yes - Very good, I used this after we had professional financial advice over the years an after an extensively tweaked and complicated spreadsheet had been endlessly tinkered with by me. What I found is that after some intial understanding had been accomplished the model confirmed our own assumptions which in itself is very useful. Running a new scenario every few months as information becomes available is very useful - worth every penny.

Comprehensive planner at a nice price.

This tool helps me to feel less anxious about my future in these increasingly uncertain times. It's a much more balanced, nuanced and rounded view than I get from my financial advisor, and helps me to have more constructive conversations with them.

My wife and I had a financial review and pension planning session with an advisor a few years ago which utilised a professional, widely adopted software.
It was a very worthwhile experience.
Time has moved on, a few things in our finances have changed a little bit, and I wondered if it was possible that a similar software was available for use directly by ourselves. Something we could try different scenarios with, without triggering a full blown and costly review.
In EvolveMyRetirement, I have found it!
Does everything I could want and more.
I think we will be making use of the program for a long time.

Straight forward to enter data.
Interesting to see result.
Good to be able to update and fine tune data.
Now need to act upon it !

What a great tool. Easy to use and fit for purpose.

First impression is very good. interesting. Looks like a good approach and will play with it alongside a more traditional cashflow analysis.