Retireeasy

Pat38493

Does anyone here use the RetireEasy Lifeplan site?

If so can you tell me, if I pay for just one month to test it out, can I easily unsubscribe from it just like with Netflix or whatever?

From what I've searched on this forum, this site used to be free, but on the website now you have to pay (granted a very small amount per month) even for the basic option.

Also, my impression from the videos they publish and the site help menu is that they model the growth of your DC investments based on a single continuous percent of growth and inflation that you yourself have to program, so there is no historical market data involved. 

rjmachin

I have not used it, so cannot confirm, but the terms state:

c. You may cancel at any time by going to 'My Account', then clicking on 'Leave Us' and following the prompts.

DreZZ

I used them for a couple of years up until July 2020. They take monthly payment via debit card continuous payment authority.  So if you wanted to cancel the subscription you can either contact them direct or call your bank and cancel the CPA. The reason I stopped using them was their software failed to work after an iOS update and they couldn't fix it.

Pat38493

DreZZ said:

I used them for a couple of years up until July 2020. They take monthly payment via debit card continuous payment authority.  So if you wanted to cancel the subscription you can either contact them direct or call your bank and cancel the CPA. The reason I stopped using them was their software failed to work after an iOS update and they couldn't fix it.

I subscribed to this for one month just to try it out and I have been playing around with various scenarios after plugging in my basic data.

Pros
- The software seems to work pretty well and presents you with various nice graphs and information about whether your scenarios are achievable based on your current situation and the assumptions you have plugged in.

- Allows you to experiment with different assumptions about growth rates and inflation rates and retirement dates.

- Could be very useful if you are not a spreadsheet wizz.

Constructive feedback points
- The model seems to be ridiculously precise in some respects, but not flexible enough in others - for example, it asks you to literally enter the amount of cash money you have in your wallet right now as if this will make a big difference, but at the same time the huge assumptions about growth and inflation rates apply to the entire 40 years and can only be adjusted in 0.5% increments on sliders.

- There is no ability to model SORR scenarios due to the same growth and inflation rates applied to all years.

- There is a maximum time window of 40 years which might not be enough if you are retiring at 55 for example.

- The model handles the use of your pension investments in a rather confusing way - you tell it what percent of drawdown you want to take out starting from a certain year.  If in any particular year there is a Surplus beyond your desired income, it labels this as "Surplus" on the charts.  It then rolls this surplus forward into future years in a "secret" account behind the scenes and applies your default growth and yield rates to it.  I can see why this might make sense, but it's not documented that it works in this way and this "secret" growth account does not appear on the spreadsheet that you can download, so at first glance, one might assume that "Surplus" means this is extra money that I can spend in that year or go to the casino or such.  
If you experiment you can tell that the surplus is being rolled forward and growth applied behind the scenes, but why not make this transparent?

- Cash Lump sum - from what I could tell, if you don't choose to take all your cash lump sum at the start of your pension withdrawals, it then assumes the entire pension is taxable on withdrawal which I don't think is correct (maybe I selected the wrong investment type there but again it's not clearly documented how to handle these scenarios)?