Planomy vs Boldin (formerly NewRetirement)

The honest summary

Boldin has been in this market for years, has a large and engaged user base, and is built around the idea that a retirement plan is a living document you maintain in an account — with the option of bringing a human into it. That is a coherent, well-executed product philosophy and for a large number of people it is the right one.

Planomy starts from a different premise: that the projection is arithmetic over numbers you supply, so it should run on your device, need no account, and cost nothing. Everything else follows from that — including the things it is worse at.

Neither of those premises is wrong. Pick the one that matches how you want to hold your financial life.

The comparison

Where your plan lives is the real decision

Everything else in that table is downstream of one row. A cloud account means your plan is available everywhere, is backed up without you thinking about it, and can be shared or looked at by someone helping you. It also means there is a server-side copy of your financial situation, that access depends on an ongoing relationship with a company, and that the tool stops working when the network does.

On-device storage inverts every one of those. No server copy, no dependency, works on a plane — and if you clear your browser data without an export, the plan is gone. There is no version of this trade-off where you get both sides for free, and any product telling you otherwise is glossing.

What Planomy's engine actually models

So that "free" is not mistaken for "shallow" — this is the whole engine, available with no account:

• Year-by-year projections with separate ledgers for cash, taxable, traditional, Roth and HSA balances, over a horizon of up to 100 years.
• Federal tax from a dated, versioned dataset — 2026 ordinary and long-term capital-gains brackets, FICA and Medicare — rather than hard-coded numbers.
• State tax for all 50 states and DC: 29 with full progressive brackets, the rest at a flat effective rate, labelled as such.
• RMDs on the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table with SECURE 2.0 start ages.
• A Social Security claiming explorer across the full 62-to-70 range, with a benefit estimate built from your earnings history.
• Medicare Part B and Part D premiums with IRMAA surcharges keyed off the two-year MAGI lookback.
• Monte Carlo across 1,000 to 10,000 trials, plus a historical backtest over every rolling window of real US returns and CPI-U inflation from 1928 to 2024.
• Four named drawdown strategies side by side, FIFO / LIFO / HIFO / lowest-tax-first lot selection on taxable sales, and Roth conversions by amount or fill-to-bracket.
• Scenarios, life events and goals, plus plan-versus-actual cash-flow tracking with optional bank sync.

Pick Boldin if…

• You want your plan to follow you across devices with no manual step, and you are comfortable with it living in an account.
• You value the option of paying for human help attached to the same software rather than finding an independent adviser separately.
• You want a long-established product with a large community around it and a lot of accumulated material to learn from.
• An ongoing subscription for a tool you will use for decades is an easy yes for you.

Pick Planomy if…

• You do not want to create an account, hand over an email, or put your finances on anyone's server to get a projection.
• You want the whole planning engine free rather than a limited free tier that pushes you toward an upgrade.
• You want it to keep working offline, and to keep working if we disappear — the plan file is yours.
• You want plan-versus-actual tracking of real spending against the plan, with bank sync as an option rather than a requirement.

Who Planomy is not for

We would rather lose you here than have you spend an evening entering a plan into the wrong tool. Choose Boldin, or something else entirely, if any of these are true.

• You want balances and prices to update themselves. Planomy has no live market-price or holdings feed. Balances are what you enter, or what an optional bank connection imports. That is a deliberate local-first trade-off, and if you want a portfolio that refreshes on its own it is the wrong tool.
• You want a person to look at your plan. Planomy does not sell advice and has no advisors attached to it. If what you actually want is a fee-only CFP to review your situation, hire one — a projection is an input to that conversation, not a replacement for it.
• You are planning outside the US. The tax engine models US federal brackets, Social Security, Medicare and IRMAA, and RMDs. None of that transfers.
• You need exact state tax in every state. 29 states plus DC carry full progressive brackets; the rest are modelled at a flat effective rate. The app tells you which kind your state is using rather than hiding it, but if you live in a flat-rate-approximated state and the state bill is the crux of your decision, treat that line as an estimate.
• Day-to-day budgeting is the whole job. Planomy compares your actual spending against your plan, but it is a long-horizon planner first. If you want envelope budgeting, receipt splitting and bill reminders, a dedicated budgeting app will serve you better.

The cheapest way to decide

Run the same inputs through both free paths and compare the year your money runs out. Where the two answers diverge, the culprit is almost always one of three assumptions: the real return, the inflation figure, or how the tool handles the tax on withdrawals. Our drawdown order guide and safe withdrawal rate guide explain what to look for. Planomy's free path needs no sign-up, so the comparison costs you nothing but the typing.