2015 Conference

Retirement Planning, Software, Tools, Education

The shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans increases employee responsibility for estimating their own optimal retirement savings needs. As a result, dozens of online retirement planning tools, most using differing inputs and default settings, are publically-available to help individuals and families manage this responsibility. The differing inputs invites the question: which inputs are necessary for publically-available retirement planning tools to provide appropriate information? We explore this question by surveying financial professionals, then testing multiple scenarios on numerous publically-available retirement planning tools to evaluate their effectiveness in providing reasonable retirement funding information in alignment with professionally recommended inputs.