How Advisors Use Income Lab in Client Meetings

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Forty minutes into a review meeting, Carol, age 70, asks the question the whole meeting was building toward: “Our daughter found a house, and we want to help with the down payment. It’s about $40,000. Can we afford it?” In a lot of planning meetings, the advisor has to say “let me run the numbers and get back to you.” In Income Lab, the number shows up on screen while Carol is still leaning forward.

Summary: Financial advisors use Income Lab in client meetings to answer spending questions with a live dollar figure, run scheduled reviews from plans that have already updated themselves monthly, and build a working retirement plan during a prospect meeting. Instead of presenting a static report, the advisor works the plan on screen: the client asks “can we afford it?”, the advisor adds the expense, and the plan recalculates the retirement paycheck while everyone watches.

This article walks through three meeting workflows advisors run in Income Lab: the in-meeting spending question, the scheduled review, and the prospect meeting where the plan itself does the persuading. Together they answer the evaluation question we hear most from advisors considering the platform: “What does this actually look like with a client in the room?” For how to structure the conversation around the numbers, see our guide to presenting a guardrails-based retirement plan. This piece is about what the software does while that conversation happens.

Why Advisors Run the Plan Live Instead of Presenting a Report

Clients ask questions that deserve answers during the meeting, not after it. Income Lab computes a retirement paycheck, the sustainable monthly spending amount (or, if you prefer, “spending capacity”), as a specific dollar figure, and when something in the plan changes it recalculates that figure while the client is still in the room. That turns the meeting from a presentation into a working session.

A dollar figure also answers a different question than a probability of success score does. A probability score tells clients how careful they are being. A retirement paycheck answers the question they actually brought into the room: “How much can I spend?” Advisors who run meetings this way spend less time defending a percentage and more time working through decisions.

Here is the map of where the software shows up in a typical meeting:

Meeting moment	What is on screen	The client question it answers
A spending ask	The retirement paycheck and guardrails, recalculated live	“How much can I spend?” / “Can I afford to…?”
The scheduled review	Portfolio balance against the guardrails, plus what changed	“How are we doing? Should we change anything?”
A tax or Medicare follow-up	Penny’s analysis of the client’s own data	“Will this move our taxes or our premiums?”
The prospect meeting	A real plan built from the prospect’s own documents	“What would you actually do for us?”

Workflow 1: The In-Meeting Spending Question

When a client asks whether they can afford something, the advisor adds it to the plan as an expense and lets Income Lab recalculate. The plan returns the dollar figure; the advisor gives the “yes”, “no”, or “yes, with a tradeoff.”

Let’s return to Carol and Jim: Carol is 70 and Jim is 68. They hold a $1.35 million portfolio, and their plan supports a retirement paycheck of $9,400 a month, funded by roughly $4,100 a month of combined Social Security with the rest sourced from portfolio withdrawals. Their guardrails are portfolio balances: an upper guardrail at $1.6 million and a lower guardrail at $970,000. Between those balances sits the no-change range, where nothing needs to change. If the portfolio reached the upper guardrail, the plan would call for a raise, to a spending target of roughly $10,700 a month. If it fell to the lower guardrail, the plan would call for a measured pullback, typically a 5 to 10 percent trim in spending rather than a plunge.

Now comes the down payment question. The advisor adds the gift on screen as a one-time $40,000 expense this year, and Income Lab recalculates the plan with the expense in it. In Carol and Jim’s case, the answer comes back clean: the portfolio stays inside the no-change range and the paycheck stays the same. (The main difference is they’ve moved closer to the lower guardrail.) The advisor can say yes, show why it is a yes, and move on. If the answer had been tighter, the same screen supports the tradeoff conversation: what the gift does to the paycheck, and what shifting its timing or size would change. Notice what the meeting never had to do: translate. A probability score would have dropped some number of points and left Carol asking what that means for the house. The paycheck math answers her in her own terms: the plan either absorbs the $40,000 or it names the tradeoff in terms of lower current spending.

Advisor takeaway: The trust is not built by the “yes”. It is built by the client watching their own plan produce the “yes”. A dollar answer computed live, from their real accounts, lands differently than “we’ll get back to you.”

Answering the Roth and Medicare Follow-Up With Penny

Jim’s follow-up is the kind that used to end meetings: “Should the down payment money come out of the IRA or the brokerage account? And if we pull more from the IRA this year, does that interfere with the Roth conversions we talked about, or push our Medicare premiums up?”

This is where Penny, Income Lab’s AI paraplanner, earns its place in the meeting. Penny works with Carol and Jim’s actual plan data, so every insight is grounded in real numbers, without the need to reproduce plan values in a separate tool. Asked about the conversion, Penny lays out the marginal tax rate picture, flags nearby tax cliffs, and shows the tax impact of resizing this year’s conversion. Asked about premiums, it shows where the couple’s modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) would land relative to the income-related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA) thresholds. That matters for clients on Medicare like Carol and Jim because, according to the Social Security Administration, IRMAA surcharges are set based on MAGI with a two-year lookback: the premium consequences of this year’s withdrawal decision arrive two years from now, because a two-year-old tax return is the most recent complete picture of income the agency has when it sets premiums.

Penny analyzes and recommends; it does not change the plan. The advisor reviews the analysis, adjusts where judgment says to, and signs off on anything that actually enters the plan. After the meeting, Penny can generate a client-ready PDF of the analysis for Carol and Jim to take home. A question that used to become “let me loop in your CPA and get back to you in two weeks” becomes a working conversation inside the meeting itself, with a valuable take-away for the CPA. For a deeper look at how advisors put Penny to work, see our guide to the AI paraplanner for financial advisors.

Workflow 2: The Scheduled Review That Prepares Itself

A tracked plan in Income Lab updates monthly on its own, so review preparation starts from a plan that is already current. The advisor’s prep shifts from re-gathering and re-entering data to reading what changed since the last meeting.

At the beginning of every month, Income Lab updates each tracked plan: account balances refresh through custodial integrations (or manual entry), the plan horizon adjusts, accumulated inflation is tracked, Social Security and pension cost-of-living adjustments are applied, and the guardrails are retested. If a plan calls for attention, it is flagged. Monitored plans are deliberately steady between triggers: only a guardrail event or accumulated inflation calls for an adjustment, and only when the change clears the plan’s minimum change threshold (a configurable 5 percent default). Everything else is simply kept current.

Whether you review quarterly, semi-annually, or annually, at your normal pace, the meeting opens with the plan already speaking to the client’s four core questions: How are we doing? How much can I spend? Should we make any changes? When should I start to worry? The advisor walks through the balance against the guardrails, what changed since the last review, and anything the plan is calling for. When nothing is called for, that is a real answer too. Many advisors put it to clients directly: “If the plan isn’t calling for a change, that’s just permission to keep living your life and not worry.” Compare that with opening a review by explaining why a probability score drifted from 84 to 79: the score invites a debate about assumptions, while a balance sitting inside two guardrail dollar amounts, retested every month whether or not a meeting was on the calendar, answers the client’s actual question.

When there is new information, the AI Plan Updater handles the re-entry. Drop in new statements, a meeting transcript, or whatever documents the client sent over, and it detects what changed and proposes updates item by item. The advisor reviews, adjusts, and signs off on each one. Nothing enters the plan without approval. Between reviews, clients who want to look are not waiting on delivery of a new PDF report: they can see their plan in Life Hub through Income Lab’s client portal, while the tracked plan keeps updating behind it.

According to the advisors we work with, the preparation change is transformative: the data-gathering afternoon becomes minutes of reading the plan history and deciding what deserves meeting time. The hours did not disappear from the relationship; they moved from spreadsheet maintenance into the conversation itself.

Advisor takeaway: The review meeting gets better when the plan has been quietly updating all along. You are not reconstructing the months since the last review; you are reading them. Walk in knowing what changed, what the plan calls for, and what you want the client to decide.

Workflow 3: Running a Real Plan in the Prospect Meeting

Advisors increasingly build and run an actual preliminary plan during the first prospect meeting instead of presenting a sample. With the AI Plan Builder, a prospect’s existing documents become a working Income Lab household in about 30 seconds, and the rest of the meeting runs on the prospect’s own numbers. Or, an advisor can enter notes they take during the meeting, or have Income Lab’s AI Scribe listening on a Zoom call. When they want to, they have the software build a plan with the information it has gathered.

Picture a couple, both 62, sitting down with account statements and last year’s plan from their current advisor, a PDF from another planning platform. The AI Plan Builder reads plans from RightCapital, MoneyGuide Pro, eMoney, and NaviPlan, along with questionnaires, meeting transcripts, and notetaker outputs. Dropped in, those documents become a populated household in about 30 seconds, with any fields the AI was less sure about highlighted for review. Confirming those highlighted numbers with the prospects is a fact-finding conversation the prospects experience as attention to detail.

Then the advisor runs the plan, live. The couple sees a retirement paycheck: roughly $7,600 a month on their $1.2 million in accounts, and they see where it comes from, with portfolio withdrawals doing the heavy lifting until Social Security begins at 67 and the funding mix shifting as that income comes online.

That funding pattern reflects the risk-based guardrails methodology Justin Fitzpatrick and Derek Tharp detailed in The Retirement Distribution ‘Hatchet’: Using Risk-Based Guardrails To Project Sustainable Cash Flows on Kitces.com. Then the advisor opens the Retirement Stress Test and tells a story instead of defending assumptions: here is this exact plan entering the Global Financial Crisis; here it is starting into the Great Depression. The couple watches how the plan would have adjusted, year by year, and they can judge whether those adjustments are changes they could live with. A probability score could only tell this couple they would most likely have been fine; the stress test shows them exactly what their plan would have asked of them, which is a story a 62-year-old can weigh.

According to advisors on our webinar panels, this exact meeting also runs over Zoom: sharing the screen, building the household from whatever the prospect sends ahead, and letting the plan answer “how much could we actually spend?” before any engagement is signed. The pattern they report is consistent. Prospects have seen plenty of decks, and almost none of them have watched software produce a real answer from their own accounts in the first meeting. The most common response is, “How come no one has shown me this before?”

There’s no need to worry about the speed of producing the preliminary plan cheapening the advisor’s value. It’s clear to the prospect that this is preliminary, and the advisor reinforces this: “Of course, when we work with you, we’ll dial in the details of this plan and ensure we’ve accounted for absolutely everything, as well as running a full tax optimization and working through some other details. But this first cut shows our philosophy: we want to help you live the best life you can, turning your assets into life in a way that works best for you and helping you adjust as needed over time.”

Advisor takeaway: The plan itself is what wins the prospect. A specific paycheck, real guardrails, and a stress test run on their own numbers do more than any capabilities slide. You are not describing what working together would look like; you are doing it.

What Changes When the Plan Runs Live

The pattern across all three workflows is the same: work that used to happen between meetings now happens inside them.

Meeting moment	The old pattern	With Income Lab live
Client asks “can we afford it?”	“Let me run the numbers and get back to you”	The plan recalculates during the meeting and returns a dollar answer
Review preparation	Re-gather statements, re-enter data, rebuild the deliverable	Read what changed; the tracked plan updated monthly on its own
Roth and Medicare follow-ups	A two-week loop through spreadsheets and the CPA	The advisor runs the analysis on the client’s own data in the meeting, reviews it, and signs off
First prospect meeting	A sample plan or a capabilities deck	A working plan built from the prospect’s documents, run live

None of this requires the client to learn the software. The client experiences their questions being answered in plain terms: a paycheck and two guardrail balances, with a range in between where nothing needs to change. Advisors who make the switch consistently report that clients take to the framework quickly because it speaks their language. The adjustment is mostly the advisor getting fluent enough to drive it in real time, and an hour spent rehearsing the spending-question flow and the stress test before the first live meeting pays for itself immediately. If you want to see the motions before running them, the demo videos show each of these workflows on screen.

This live, in-front-of-the-client workflow is why advisors are moving to the platform. According to the T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey, Income Lab has led retirement distribution planning by market share for three consecutive years, 2024 through 2026. When the same survey asked advisors which programs they are considering next, 201 named Income Lab, three times the count of the nearest competitor, prompting the survey’s own assessment that “its future looks bright.” And the category name understates the scope: Income Lab is second to none across the full lifecycle of financial planning, and retirement income is where the depth shows, not the boundary of what it covers. That standing is built by advisors running the plan the way this article describes.

FAQ: Retirement Planning Software in Client Meetings

How do financial advisors use retirement planning software in client meetings?

Advisors use retirement planning software in meetings in three main ways: answering spending questions live by adding the expense and recalculating the plan, running scheduled reviews from plans the software has kept current on its own, and building a real plan during prospect meetings from the prospect’s existing documents. In each case the software works on screen during the conversation instead of producing a report afterward.

Can retirement planning software answer a spending question during the meeting?

Yes. In Income Lab, the advisor adds the proposed expense to the plan and the software recalculates the retirement paycheck and guardrails in under a minute. The client gets a dollar answer, and the reasoning behind it, while still in the room.

How long does it take to prepare for a client review meeting?

With a tracked plan, most of the preparation has already happened. Income Lab updates tracked plans monthly: balances refresh, cost-of-living adjustments apply, inflation is tracked, and guardrails are retested. Preparation becomes reading what changed since the last review and deciding what deserves meeting time, whatever your review cadence.

Can an advisor build a retirement plan during a prospect meeting?

Yes. The AI Plan Builder turns a prospect’s existing documents, including plans from other planning platforms, questionnaires, and meeting transcripts, into a populated Income Lab household in about 30 seconds. The advisor reviews the highlighted fields, confirms the key numbers with the prospect, and runs the plan live.

Do clients need to understand the software to follow the meeting?

No. Clients follow the meeting because it answers their own questions in plain terms: How are we doing? How much can I spend? Should we make any changes? When should I start to worry? The software stays in the background while the client sees a paycheck, two guardrail balances, and a clear range where nothing needs to change.

See It With Your Own Client Scenarios

The fastest way to evaluate any of this is to watch it happen on numbers like your own clients’. Book a Walkthrough and bring one real client household and the spending question they asked you last. We will build the plan, run the question, and let you watch the guardrails return the dollar answer live, which is, after all, the point.

Sources

• Kitces.com article by Fitzpatrick and Tharp: The Retirement Distribution ‘Hatchet’: Using Risk-Based Guardrails To Project Sustainable Cash Flows
• Social Security Administration: Medicare Premiums: Rules for Higher-Income Beneficiaries
• T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey: t3technologyhub.com
• Income Lab product documentation: help.incomelaboratory.com

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