The Pralana retirement calculator developers announced on the Pralana forum that Pralana Online is now available and I wanted to share my impressions. Pralana Online will replace their Pralana Gold spreadsheet, which was already the most powerful consumer level product I'd seen. By breaking free of the limitations of a spreadsheet, Pralana Online adds even more power and flexibility.
The interface is much different from the spreadsheet with things organized into “Build”, “Review”, “Analyze” and “More”. “More” contains data management, release notes, etc. “Analyze” contains the fancy features that Pralana Gold users loved - Historical and Monte Carlo analyses, spending strategies, Roth Conversions, Withdrawal Order Optimization, SS claiming strategy optimization and Earliest Safe Retirement analysis. Withdrawal Order Optimization now automatically splits things into before and after RMDs and looks at the best order of which account to use for both time frames simultaneously, so it’s examining 625 possibilities. There is a lot more sophistication in handling Social Security, with month by month claim dates (including in the optimizer), survivor benefit calculations and the like.
Now you can have as many income streams, rental properties, etc. as you care to track. You can set different inflation rates and have them change at various times for many different types of expenses.
A pet peeve of mine has been fixed in that if the program determines you need to sell assets to raise cash, it will now put the capital gains taxes for that in the current year. That was not possible in the spreadsheet version due to the iterative calculation it would require, so the spreadsheet put the taxes in the following year. In comparison, other consumer level products I've seen don't attempt to track capital gains taxes at all, let alone put them in the right year.
Online has mock-up tax forms so you can follow along exactly how it’s calculating your taxes. It emphasizes that this is approximate, but the level of detail is eye-popping. I’m not sure what all forms it can do, but on my “return” it shows a 1040, Schedule 1 & 2, Sch A and home mortgage worksheet, Pub 915 (taxable SS benefits), Schedule D (capital gains), form 6251 (AMT), 8606, 8995 (QBIs), 8960 (NIIT), and a generic state return (I live in Texas, so that’s empty). Wow.
A report called “Account Statements” shows the ins and outs for each account for each year. This is a great way to make sure that the tool is doing what you want and to see the cash flow between accounts.
The “Balance Sheet” report allows you to click on any account balance in any year and it will show the adds and subtracts that get to the final number.
If you are not comfortable saving your data online, you can export it to your machine and delete everything stored on-line.
If you have an advisor that uses Pralana, you can share your plan back and forth with them (the Advisor has to buy a more expensive version of the program that allows this).
If you have a bug report, or something’s not working the way you think it should, there is a Feedback button which will notify the developers. Since it’s generally quite hard to investigate without looking at your details, you can temporarily give the developers access to your plan.
There are release notes in the program so you can see what’s changed, bug fixes, new features, etc., so you will immediately know if you need to review your plan. (In the spreadsheet world, you had to check now and then for new available versions to download).
The manual is built-in, so you can refer to it at the click of a button.
The developers started writing the Online version in early 2022. It went through a beta process this spring to shake out any big issues and there have been 200 users using it in a limited release for several months plus of course they’ve got the spreadsheet version as way to check.
As a long time Pralana Gold user, it took me a little while to find everything in the new user interface, but it’s worth the wait and the new program puts them even further ahead of the competition.
The interface is much different from the spreadsheet with things organized into “Build”, “Review”, “Analyze” and “More”. “More” contains data management, release notes, etc. “Analyze” contains the fancy features that Pralana Gold users loved - Historical and Monte Carlo analyses, spending strategies, Roth Conversions, Withdrawal Order Optimization, SS claiming strategy optimization and Earliest Safe Retirement analysis. Withdrawal Order Optimization now automatically splits things into before and after RMDs and looks at the best order of which account to use for both time frames simultaneously, so it’s examining 625 possibilities. There is a lot more sophistication in handling Social Security, with month by month claim dates (including in the optimizer), survivor benefit calculations and the like.
Now you can have as many income streams, rental properties, etc. as you care to track. You can set different inflation rates and have them change at various times for many different types of expenses.
A pet peeve of mine has been fixed in that if the program determines you need to sell assets to raise cash, it will now put the capital gains taxes for that in the current year. That was not possible in the spreadsheet version due to the iterative calculation it would require, so the spreadsheet put the taxes in the following year. In comparison, other consumer level products I've seen don't attempt to track capital gains taxes at all, let alone put them in the right year.
Online has mock-up tax forms so you can follow along exactly how it’s calculating your taxes. It emphasizes that this is approximate, but the level of detail is eye-popping. I’m not sure what all forms it can do, but on my “return” it shows a 1040, Schedule 1 & 2, Sch A and home mortgage worksheet, Pub 915 (taxable SS benefits), Schedule D (capital gains), form 6251 (AMT), 8606, 8995 (QBIs), 8960 (NIIT), and a generic state return (I live in Texas, so that’s empty). Wow.
A report called “Account Statements” shows the ins and outs for each account for each year. This is a great way to make sure that the tool is doing what you want and to see the cash flow between accounts.
The “Balance Sheet” report allows you to click on any account balance in any year and it will show the adds and subtracts that get to the final number.
If you are not comfortable saving your data online, you can export it to your machine and delete everything stored on-line.
If you have an advisor that uses Pralana, you can share your plan back and forth with them (the Advisor has to buy a more expensive version of the program that allows this).
If you have a bug report, or something’s not working the way you think it should, there is a Feedback button which will notify the developers. Since it’s generally quite hard to investigate without looking at your details, you can temporarily give the developers access to your plan.
There are release notes in the program so you can see what’s changed, bug fixes, new features, etc., so you will immediately know if you need to review your plan. (In the spreadsheet world, you had to check now and then for new available versions to download).
The manual is built-in, so you can refer to it at the click of a button.
The developers started writing the Online version in early 2022. It went through a beta process this spring to shake out any big issues and there have been 200 users using it in a limited release for several months plus of course they’ve got the spreadsheet version as way to check.
As a long time Pralana Gold user, it took me a little while to find everything in the new user interface, but it’s worth the wait and the new program puts them even further ahead of the competition.
Statistics: Posted by Exchme — Thu Oct 03, 2024 7:17 pm — Replies 3 — Views 245