Full Life-Cycle Planning: One Plan, From the Working Years Through Retirement.

Okay, welcome everyone. Give everybody some time to get in the virtual room here. But thank you for joining us. Got a bunch of people coming in, so move through the doors quickly, find a seat. And if in the meantime you want to share in the chat where you're calling in from, it's always fun to see the breadth of geography. Awesome, all over the country. I am in Colorado as usual. We're having a nice spring here, unlike our winter, which barely happened. We're actually getting a little bit of rain, just like rainy Kansas, which is nice. All right. Well, let's get started. Just a couple housekeeping items. If you do have questions, please go ahead and put them in the Q&A ideally, and then if you see questions there that you want to have us answer, go ahead and give them a thumbs up. And you're welcome to use the chat, it's just a little harder for us to actually monitor, so can't guarantee that we'll see things there. It also tends to be a lot busier in there, so harder to find things. All right, I saw a feature request in there. Looks good. All right, so today we're going to be talking about how to get the most out of Income Lab across your set of clients. So Income Lab is super well known, as we should be, for our retirement planning. So I want to step back just a little bit and look at the philosophy behind Income Lab and also some ways that you can use Income Lab before retirement, at retirement, during, and so on. So I wanted to start with, and you've heard me talk a lot if you've been on our webinars before about our philosophy around what we're doing. And our mission is to revolutionize how people navigate their financial lives so that they can live with confidence. And that second part in particular, the living with confidence, kind of feeds into this question that at this point I've asked a lot of people, give a lot of talks at conferences and things, and this is sort of what I've distilled from all those conversations of what the goal is of planning in the first place. What's the point? What are we trying to do? Is it providing people with a probability of success score? Is it giving them a table of numbers? No, obviously not. At a core, it's a mission to help people live the best lives they can. Not in a crazy, the best life they could ever dream of, or the wildest life. No, it's the best life you can, given the resources you have and the time you have left. And so somebody who's been a school teacher their whole life is not going to be flying private jets. That's fine. They know that. But we're wanting to help them turn their resources into whatever a good life is for them that they can actually afford. It's really easy to think and talk about that in retirement, because that's when it's really difficult for a client to figure out, well, what can I afford? And that's why we focus so much on answering the question in Income Lab, what can I spend? Because in your working years, it's a little clearer, it's pretty obvious. Spend less than you make. But in your retirement years, that's less obvious, so there's this big question of well what am I eligible for? But actually, this concept of live the best life you can within whatever that means for your resources-wise and your values and your priorities and so on, it actually applies at every point in life. And so including if you work with people who are deep in their working years, beginning their working years, just pre-retirement, at retirement, in retirement, late in retirement. That's kind of always what it's about. It's just the ways that a financial advisor or financial planner can help them do that change a bit. And as Income Lab has evolved over the years, as hundreds and thousands of people have started using Income Lab with hundreds of thousands of families, we've gotten more and more requests of kind of, "Hey, can you help me do this for more purposes, for more places?" And the answer has typically been yes. So today that's what I want to talk about, is how to use Income Lab to do this, whether it's in this high-flying sort of philosophical sense, or down to the nitty-gritty of the little things we do to help people. And it's always going to be about things like helping them prioritize and optimize... helping them navigate the ups and downs. When do we need to make adjustments? Helping them visualize the road ahead and understand what life is really going to look like with the help of their advisor, and giving them permission to live a life they can afford without undue regret. So it's all of those things, and then it's also all the little just ways you can make their life a little bit better. Help them avoid traps that could cost them money, and things like that. So this focus is a little bit different depending on the point in life that they have. So in retirement, and this is the marquee part of Income Lab, the focus is on how much can I spend. But it's also on understanding that that number can change, but we only want to make changes when it's really worthwhile. So it's also on what would change that? What would change what I could spend? Those are the guardrails. And what would those changes look like? And then finally, how do I optimize for taxes, given that typically in retirement, the retirement paycheck is made up of many things. It could be Social Security, pensions, rental income. Could be, and of course, withdrawals from investment accounts. Which themselves could be Roths and IRAs and 401Ks and taxable accounts and so on. If we go down from those super important, the core of retirement planning, to some of the slightly more tactical decisions we have. When should we claim Social Security? How should we allocate our investments? What goals would we pursue if we could spend more? And how would we absorb adjustments during rough patches? Those last two are about that visualizing what would happen when things change. In the period right before retirement, we're asking slightly different primary questions. Like, how much might we be able to spend at retirement? When will we retire? In what manner will we, quote-unquote, "retire?" Is this a situation where we want to think about how we want to spend our time? Are we easing into retirement? Are we working part-time? Are we changing to something else? And there's a period of preparation for spending instead of saving. We encounter this a lot in feedback from advisors who use Income Lab. Because an Income Lab plan used in the period before retirement or right at retirement, it's often a total mind shift for clients who've never seen it before. They've gone from maybe a probability of success score, or maybe they've worked with an advisor where the only focus was the investment mix, and so they've never even thought about getting advice on how much they can spend. And sometimes, in fact I'd say probably 90-plus percent of the time, their Income Lab plan says that they can spend or will be able to spend more than they're spending today or more than they thought they would be able to spend. And so they come into this situation where they say, "Wow, my challenge isn't that I'm overspending." That does happen. We do hear of people who you have to have the hard conversation in the other direction. But instead, they just find that they've worked out their saving muscle so much that it's really well-developed, it's strong, but their spending muscle is totally atrophied. And so this is also a period where we want to help you start working that muscle out, that spending muscle, or at least to reimagine what life looks like and really understand and get permission to spend. So those are just the high level things. We're working back. We went, we're in retirement now, we're pre-retirement. And at this point, there's also some of those same things that we're working on. When should we claim Social Security? How should we allocate our investments? How should we optimize pre-retirement savings? So we're going to go through all the tools that help you do all these things. But moving back to the earliest stage that we're going to go through today, which is the working years. Where retirement is far enough off that even concepts like what could I spend in retirement? They're interesting, but it's so far away that it's not that important. So for example, if you have somebody who might retire in 20 years, showing them the classic Income Lab dashboard of well, you can spend $10,000 a month in 20 years. Just not that important, not that interesting, because they know so much could change between now and then. I don't even know how to think about that. So instead, it's more about what are our near or medium-term financial goals? How do we prepare for those goals and hit those goals? And there is a long-term goal, which is saving for retirement, which is how much should we save? Some supporting things here are about what are our financial values? How do we balance near-term and long-term needs and goals? Especially in those working years, there's a lot of stuff that comes up. That isn't necessarily retirement-focused. So it could be paying for kids' schools. It can be just normal household stuff. It could be buying a house. Cars. It tends to be a lot more immediate needs. And so it's balancing those two things, the near term and long-term needs. And then finally, across all periodsWe're constantly asking, well, how do we turn these long-term plans, these big ideas into actions for today? And are there any immediate tactical moves that would put us on better footing for those big goals of living a good life now and in the future? So with that as a broad view of the way that we think about addressing the working years, the pre-retirement years, and then the retirement years, I want to talk about how Income Lab helps you do those things. And the first place is looking at tools that are useful at all points in time, in all those phases. And the first two, so this would be LifeHub, the Insights Dashboard, the Balance Sheet, Penny, and the Document Vault, which is coming out in June. So big on early announcement of that here, but I know a lot of people have been asking for a vault for a long time. And so if you know these, these are really useful across all periods, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time on LifeHub and the Insights Dashboard here first to make sure that people are familiar with how to use those. So let me just pull those up. Okay. So this is a good example. It's a pre-retirement household. So their retirement plan, their income plan starts in 2034. Right? So this would probably be an example of somebody that it's eight years out, so maybe it's starting to get kind of interesting to them. But it's eight years out, so even saying that, oh, their projected balance is almost $6 million, we could look, and today it's 3.35 million. That's great. Maybe that will be their balance, but everybody knows it's eight years out. We don't really know what the balance will be. A lot of things could happen between now and then, and it's projecting that they'll be able to spend $23,000 a month at that point. Again, great to know. But this is eight years in the future. If it were 15, 20 years in the future, even less kind of useful or something I can visualize. So the first place that a lot of people like to go for a pre-retirement plan is LifeHub. This is actually the most used tool in Income Lab is LifeHub. It's just a place where people spend a lot of time because the goal is clarity in your financial situation and your financial plan. So that kind of clarity is important at any point in time, working years, pre-retirement, or in retirement. LifeHub is not a pure retirement tool. It's a visualization tool for an entire plan. And so often what people really like to see here in any phase, but let's take it in a pre-retirement phase here because that's what this example is, is we can look through, okay, do we have all your investment accounts right? I often have advisors say they sort of use this almost as like a visual CRM, like a reminder of what they have going on in their life, right? And what they'll have in the future. So for example, here, I've got the primary residence, a lake house, and John's business. Okay, well, that quickly reminds me, all right, I'm remembering. And in real life, I probably would have named these things, right? And clients love this as well, regardless of the phase in their life. They kind of want to see this as sort of the tree with all the leaves on it of their financial life, and they want to make sure that it's really complete and correct. So this is a really good place to start no matter what phase of life you're looking at. It also gives people a way to see the near term. So this is particularly important in the working years or in the pre-retirement phase because a lot of things are changing there. So for example, if I mouse over John's salary here, it gives me a little view of where that's going to be going. And then I also see in the timeline above when different things are happening. Same with the mortgage here, right? So this is a really good place for someone to kind of view the near term, maybe the next five or 10 years and to focus on that. The other one that I mentioned is the Insights Dashboard. It's possible many of you have not seen this. We're going to be taking the beta tag off here very soon. That doesn't mean that it's done. We do have some other things to work on here, but this one's really interesting because especially for people in their working years, that future what can I spend number, which is available here, but it's not the core thing that we want to work on. And so they're more focused on savings rate, tax rate, debt to income ratio, and so on.The other things that you can do here are give them a feeling for where they are in terms of their balance sheet, assets, debt, viewed in dollar terms, in percentage terms. So for example, we can see most of their debt here is mortgages. Or even in ratio terms, which gives them a feel for how big their debt or assets are compared to their spending or their income. So for example, their mortgages are 40% of their annual income. That doesn't mean they're going to pay off their mortgage this year, but it gives you a feel that, hey, that's not a huge amount. Their cash is 30% of their annual spending, which you can also basically see here in their emergency fund. So just these are the kinds of things, or estate and insurance planning. These are the kinds of things that really help for those working years kind of situations. Last on this, we have the goals. And this is a great place. Again, I talked about for pre-retirees and especially for working years people, we're talking about what are our near and medium-term financial goals. So this is a great place to actually quantify some of those. I just made kind of a fake one here. Maybe John really has a goal of getting his IRA balance up to one and a quarter million dollars. He has $800,000 today. You can just create those really easily here, choose an account to focus on, or more than one account, name it, give it a type, and then you can actually calculate how much we need for the annual contribution. And then you can say, "Well, this is how much I'm actually putting in." So a really good way to kind of just track those goals. And then finally, you have a place for kind of more freeform type working with a client. Maybe it's here I put in kind of a household mission statement. Could be this kind of thing, more philosophical, or could be just more mundane or important kind of life things going on, and to-dos as well. So this is a place where Income Lab has really leaned in to try to help you to have those conversations about living a good life, but in kind of the working years time. However, it does still work at retirement and in retirement. So if I move this plan out to 2038, where we're deep into, right here, I guess 2035 is my first full retirement year. Now, instead of seeing my savings rate, I'm seeing my withdrawal rate. Other things are still important in the retirement period, right? My debt-to-income ratio, still important. Tax rate, still important, and so on. So, this really, it's just helping you kind of have a conversation beyond the pure what can I spend? What would change that? kind of conversation. Let me go back to our presentation. And let me also check whether we've got any questions. Let's see here. Wealthy is definitely broad. It might be different types of situations. How do you use the emergency fund panel? Okay, so for that, let me go back to that. The emergency fund is defined just as the banking account balance, divided by the monthly budgeted spending. Okay? So if you have no banking account assets in the plan, this is going to be blank. Also, if you have no budgeted spending, it's going to be blank. So for this one, I've got living expenses. They have to be baseline expenses, by the way. They can't be variable expenses, because the emergency fund is really about, hey, just putting food on the table, that kind of thing. It's the basic living expenses. So if you had some big, "I'm going to buy a car this month," we don't want that as part of the calculation of the emergency fund. And then over here in the assets, it's looking at these. So basically, we've got $30,000 in banking accounts. We have $10,000 a month in living expenses. That makes three months. So that's where that's coming from. And yes, we'll send out these slides. Okay. Somebody had a few questions also on the insights dashboard. There actually is a report here, so just hit Generate report, and it'll create it for you. You can determine if you want a cover page, reference materials, and so on. So definitely the view is printable in that sense. And then, the insights dashboard future value or present value in the goals section. These are... Let me see. So there are a few. Okay, so you can view the whole thing in real or nominal, but the main things that are going to change there are really just balance at retirement. Everything else here, well, no, I guess if you're in the future, then any dollar amounts would be in future or today's dollars. Percentages are generally not going to be changing. Here, this one, you're going to stop me here. I believe this is... is today's dollars. Okay. I'm glad we put a little... Yeah. So you're putting a target balance in today's dollars. The concept behind that was that probably if somebody is setting a goal, they're thinking about it in today's dollars. The best explanation I use for explaining today's dollars versus future dollars is, in today's dollars, this amount will buy me the same amount of milk in 10 years as it will today, the same car in 10 years as it will today, and so on. So that's today's dollars. Yep. Rate of return is actually nominal. It's gross of inflation. What we're trying to do with this is, because a client might be seeing this with you, speak in terms that they're most likely to think in. And so if they're thinking of returns, they're probably not thinking in real returns net of inflation. We will do the math to take inflation out and so on. And then the annual contribution is also today's dollars. Again, just thinking how someone could work here. All right. Yeah, good point, Robert, on the, hey, could we include certain variable expenses in the emergency fund? That's a really good point. And I think including mortgages would probably be a great little tweak to that emergency fund calculation. So thank you for that feedback. All right. Can you modify the inflation rate? Yes, absolutely. So that is everything that you see in the insights dashboard is based on the plan itself. So this is not a different thing. This is just another way of viewing values from the plan. And so the inflation is the assumed inflation rate for the plan itself. Depending on what analysis method you're using, we'll be pulling it in from a different place. So if you were using traditional Monte Carlo, for example, this one has a 2.53% assumed inflation rate. That's what you would be seeing in a plan that's using this. Income Lab does allow you multiple ways of analyzing a plan. There's regime-based Monte Carlo, in which case there's a near term and a long-term set of assumptions. Our default is the near term is the first 10 years of the plan, and long-term is everything else. So if you were using that here, inflation would be 3.54% for the first 10 years, and then 2.23% thereafter. So probably don't have time to go over all the ins and outs of regime-based Monte Carlo and so today, but these are places you could adjust them. If you're using the historical analysis method, you're just going to get the historical inflation rate, which I think is also around 2.5%, if I remember right. So hopefully that helps. Okay. Back to this. So that's Life Hub and the insights dashboard. I won't go over the balance sheet, Penny or the vault right now. I'm going to hit on Penny in a second. But I want to dig in more to tools in Income Lab that are a little bit more specific to particular phases in life. So one is the pre-retirement planner. This is also one that you may or may not have used before. So just to give you a feeling for this. You want to go to Decision Lab, and actually, I built a really simple plan here that I'm going to use. So I go to Decision Lab, Pre-Retirement Planner, and then I'm going to hit Get Started, which is going to allow me to put in some numbers. So anything in Decision Lab is really about focusing on a particular topic with a client and sort of having a great discussion. And so this one is about when could I retire and how much should I save in the meantime? So first of all, it's going to ask what your pre-retirement income is. It'll pull it in from the plan. You can change this, by the way, and it actually doesn't have a big impact on the tool itself, but it's nice to have. One place it has that impact is here, which is how much would you like to spend per month when retired, and it defaults to an 80% replacement ratio, but you're welcome to change this. This again is really more of a how do I think about the results of the tool rather than crucial for the calculations. And now we're going to be asked, okay, what range of saving do you want to explore between $0 in this case and $3,000 a month? Again, you can change it. If this plan had had savings in it already, I would be allowed to say, "Keep the plan savings and explore additional savings." By default, that would be unchecked because typically people are going to want to use this as kind of a starting out from first principles, what should we be saving and when can we retire? And then lastly, I'm going to be asked for a range of years to explore. So I'm going to explore here between 2028 and 2032, but you can change that. Then I'm going to hit Explore Options. And now what the tool is doing is it's basically building you, in this case, 25 different plans where you save different amounts, and you retire at different times. And unlike tools that are focused on probability of success, where they might say, "Oh, if you do this, then your probability of success goes from 90 to 80." And you're left to wonder, well, okay, does that matter?Do I care? What you're seeing here is how would your monthly retirement paycheck change depending on when you retire or how much you save. And so this is a very typical result where you'll see a little bit of a diagonal where you could actually save less and retire later. Okay? Or you could save more and retire sooner. And so this is about having a conversation with that client about those trade-offs because maybe the client has a really firm idea of when they want to retire, or maybe they have a really firm idea of how much they want to save. Great. But if they don't, it shows them that kind of trade-off. It even gets them thinking about, could I live on a little less if I could retire sooner? I don't know why this is taking a second to come in here. I might have to rerun it. They might say, "Oh, wow, maybe I could retire today if I could just live on a little bit less." And so that's the conversation we want people having rather than a, okay, we know exactly when you want to retire, and we know exactly how much you're going to save. What's the probability of success of that? So we've kind of flipped it on its head and said, how can I live a good life, right? And so we want to have that discussion here. It's possible everybody who's on this webinar is using this tool at the same time, so that's probably why we're getting a little bit slow on this. All right. Let's go to... Okay. Next is Tax Lab. Tax Lab is about the plan for how you're going to take money out of your accounts once you're retired and whether you should do Roth conversions actually at any time in life. So the reason I kind of put it even into the working years, although it's much less common that people are going to do Roth conversions in the working years because they might be more toward peak earnings or earning a lot, and maybe they want to wait until a period where they're making a bit less. It is, in theory, usable really all the way back. But we mostly see it in kind of that pre-retirement to early retirement phase. So these are these tools that are not, I would say, useful across the entire life cycle, right? You're not typically looking at Roth conversions with somebody in their 80s or 90s, and maybe not with somebody in their 20s either. At that point, maybe if they're not making a lot, they should just be contributing to Roths. But that's really what Tax Lab is all about. So, I don't want to make this presentation just a full demo of Income Lab, but just to give you a feeling for what Tax Lab is about, for those of you who haven't used Income Lab before. It takes an entire plan with everything in it, Social Security, withdrawals, pensions, and it runs it through 20 ways that you could either do Roth conversions or not, that you could source your withdrawals in retirement. And it gives you a heat map of how those different withdrawal strategies, tax-aware withdrawal strategies, play out in the plan. It gives you a feeling for, do Roth conversions make sense for these people, for example? And for these folks, doing Roth conversions to the 24% bracket seems to have a lot of value. But I would say what's really interesting here is kind of a range of Roth conversion strategies give you a lot of value. So I often encourage people not to sort of get bogged down in the precision of this and instead kind of squint at it, because we don't know what the future holds. We don't know what future tax rates would be. We don't know what future returns will be. And so that's important to kind of say, all right, we're looking at, it looks like for you, some sort of Roth convergence, maybe between the 22% bracket and the 32% bracket, including a bunch of IRMAA brackets. Maybe that makes a lot of sense for you. And we can see that then in this graph, which is showing you the advantages over time in terms of taxes saved, total net income increased, net legacy increased, or if I flip these left to right, it shows me them in terms of a cost of not doing the conversions. Again, this is typically something that you'd explore closer to retirement, but you certainly could do it earlier in retirement. And it gives you a way to go through with clients their tax situation. So, for example, here, I'm able to show them if I did Roth conversions this year, I forget what that one was, '22. It'll show them what that looks like. This also links back to Life Hub. If I have Roth conversions, I can actually view them down to the account level. This is the other thing that people really love at any point in time, but more in retirement. They love being able to see what withdrawals they take from which accounts in a tax-smart way. For all of these, if anybody's kind of new to Income Lab, there are videos and all sorts of resources on each of these tools. So again, we don't have time to go into everything about these. We also run Income Lab academies and all sorts of things where you can learn more about theseThe next two tools, and again, these are more pre-retirement tools, especially the Social Security Optimizer, but works a little bit into retirement as well. So I'm going to go to a simple Social Security example I have. And again, you'll find the Social Security Optimizer in Decision Lab, and just like the Pre-Retirement Planner, it's about asking that question, really focusing on it, and then having a conversation with the client. So what this one is doing is saying, all right, we have two people here. So that means between 62 and 70 for two people, we have over 9,000 ways we could claim Social Security. What's my best option? And it's not as simple as just doing the math. I think somebody was asking in the chat, "How can I be sure these numbers are right?" And we'll definitely address that, but it's complicated stuff. But also, just like we don't know the future of taxes, we don't know how long you'll live. We don't know whether there'll be benefit cuts at some point. And so this is not about just giving you a pure output. You actually can do a report from this as well. But it's about playing around, asking questions. Okay, well what if we don't live into our 90s? How would it change if maybe we live a little bit more of an average life expectancy? And making it clear to clients that their preferences about claiming, and typically the preferences are to claim early, are not always crazy. And as I either move you more toward an average life expectancy, as I consider that there might be benefit cuts, as I take into account the fact that there is an opportunity cost, there's a cost to not claiming Social Security. You can see the heat map change and the "optimal" strategy move around as well. Probably the coolest thing about this tool is the stress test. Because so often people have a discussion about Social Security claiming just focusing on the absolute dollar amount you expect to get from Social Security over your lifetime. Instead here, and again, we're probably about to crash the server with thousands of people trying to do this all at once, but it's going to show you, I can actually do it, I think over here. I can look at a plan where I claim early, and compare it to a plan where I claim late, and I will notice that in the plan where I claim early, because I'm not taking as much money out of my accounts, the balance recovers a lot sooner and is much higher today than it would've been if I had planned to claim late. Because if I claimed late, I would've had to take a lot more money from my account balances between age 62 and age 70. So really great stuff that we can do to show people a little bit more about Social Security optimization than just a, hey, what's my balance or what's my benefit amount? Okay, and then lastly, we're going to look at the income and guardrails and the stress test. We already were looking at the stress test there, but this is the core, the key part of Income Lab that most people have used and seen a ton, and where really it's easiest to have that conversation about why we're focused on helping people live the best life they can, rather than on stats like, what's my probability of success? So for this tool, this is most likely useful just pre-retirement, so maybe in the first three, four, or five years before retirement, you're going to introduce clients to this concept that, hey, when we do retirement planning, we're going to be thinking about not probability of success if they've seen that before. And it's becoming much more common because of direct to consumer tools that have probability of success. They're going to ask you about it, so it's a really good way to say, "Hey, that's not really the way we should think about retirement. We want to think about, what can I spend, and when should I change that?" And so that's what this is about. And I would introduce this at least a year or two before retirement, so they're starting to think, oh, this is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to manage our lifestyle. Okay, in the last couple minutes here, I want to get to Penny, which is also a really useful tool. This is our tactical planning tool, our last mile tool. And there's a whole bunch of things that are useful here across the entire client life cycle. This includes the ability to upload and analyze tax returns, build scenarios, do a tax planning report with observations that are useful now, explore marginal rates, explore Roth conversions. Really can be used at any point in time. Probably Roth Conversion Analyzer, again, more likely it's a narrower period. But let's go to Penny here. I'm going to change the household hereI think I uploaded a form already. Yeah. So I uploaded a Form 1040 for this household already. So you can do that. It's also, you can actually use Penny if you don't even have an Income Lab plan for them. You can upload a 1040, a full tax return, a tax transcript, and do all of this analysis without an Income Lab plan at all, which is awesome, and I think a lot of people, they really like that. The other great thing about having Penny connected to a real plan is you actually don't need a tax return. So even if you're just using their Income Lab plan, you can already get the tax planning report. I don't even need to upload a tax return. What's great is the Income Lab plan actually has a plan for 2026. A tax return is by its nature a historical document. That doesn't mean it's not useful. It's super useful. But that's why having this ability to do both plans, Income Lab plans, where it's going to point out things like, all right, we've got 19,000 left before the next IRMAA tier, and that matters because that would be IRMAA Tier 1, and you're going to be subject to Medicare premium increases, and just pointing out those important things. You can get that without having a tax return, without having actually gotten a tax return from the client. Then again, you can also do it if you do have the tax return. So it's really the best of both worlds there. And these, again, are not restricted to being an in-retirement kind of thing. You can do it in the working years. You can do it in pre-retirement. Maybe somebody said, "Oh, we're planning to move to Florida." Okay, quickly, boom, second scenario. What's that do for me? I don't know why I made him blind there. I can then quickly see the differences, right? It's going to save me over $8,000 in taxes. I can also print here. Maybe I want to do a comparison of the household plan versus move to Florida, and boom, print it out for my client. That move could have to do with retirement or not, right? This is the kind of stuff that's tactical point solutions for clients. You can have as many of these as you want. You can launch from here into any of these other tools. It's really amazing. Marginal tax rate, marginal rate explorer, same kind of thing. You're sort of saying, all right, well, maybe they need $10,000 for a new air conditioner or something. All right, where are we going to take that from? If I go too high, will I be tripping into some new tax rates? Maybe it's Roth conversions and you're trying to dial in this year's Roth conversions. I'm going to switch to one that I know has some Roth conversions in it. So maybe you have a plan to convert up to the 12% bracket, but you want to dial it in for this year. Maybe now you know the amount of investment income of different sorts that you really have this year. Maybe, oh, you know what? We forgot. We actually have some tax-exempt interest from muni bonds. Let's look at that. Let's see how that changes maybe our IRMAA brackets. So you're kind of dialing things in, and then once it's dialed in, you can print a report on it for a client. So all of those things, the tax planning report, the marginal rate explorer, the scenario builder, to some extent the Roth conversion analysis, are useful across the entire life cycle. And then there are things that are still tax tools, but they're more about maybe your working years, or maybe a little bit more in the pre-retirement phase. So again, going back to Penny, this would be things like NUA analysis. That's net unrealized appreciation. That's typically when somebody has employer stock, and maybe they're leaving their employer and they want to know, how should I move this out? It does a quick, again, it's a point solution that's going to optimize and say, yeah, in this case, NUA looks like it's going to save you money. Here's how much. Here's how the strategy would play out. Right? So this one's going to save me $62,000 over time to do NUA. Boom, go ahead and print out a report on that. So again, that's not the kind of thing that I need to have that conversation about 20 years ahead of time. It's the kind of thing that comes up when it's happening. Just in the interest of time, I'm going to skip the W-4 optimizer and the estimated tax tool. Those are about helping people kind of optimize taxes in their working years. But I do want to hit on a few in the Medicare section. So this is more in that pre-retirement and retirement phase. And it's one that I think is missed a lot, but it's really, really useful for people. So I'm going to go back to my pre-retirement household, and let's look at Medicare. So I'm getting pulled in automatically into this IRMAA appeal, my MAGI from two years ago, and my current estimated MAGI. I'm going to go ahead and change these just to imagine that actually it's gone a little different, and maybe two years ago, they were making a lot of money, or they sold a business, and this year, their MAGI is going to be a lot lower.What a lot of people don't know is that if you've had one of the life-changing events that are useful for this appeal, instead of paying high Medicare premiums, you can actually appeal that and potentially save a lot of money this year, maybe next year as well. And this tool lets you do that super quick. Again, it's going to pull in any information we have from the plan, but if you don't even have a plan, you can still use it. And then immediately I can go to just print this memo out for them, shows them the possible savings, shows them how to do it. It's not guaranteeing them the savings, but it's sort of showing them just this value that you, because you know about these things and you're their financial advisor, it's money that I'm saving you right now. So this one we've got just a ton of really great feedback on. A lot of people are using it. There's some other things in here, helping people plan for the transition between retirement and Medicare. Here, I'm going to switch back to my presentation so you can see these others. There's beneficiary classification and optimization. This one is actually-- I won't go into it super deeply, but it's basically if somebody inherits an IRA or something, with all the crazy rules from the SECURE Act and so on, it'll tell you what their options are and how to optimize taking that money. So just not the kind of thing-- I'm certainly not capable of remembering what a qualified, unqualified, designated, undesignated beneficiary, all that stuff are. And so these tools help you do that. And then lastly, you have the multi-beneficiary optimizer. Again, these are more of estate planning type tools. It's about where does either where's my money going to go or how should I take the funds that I have inherited? The multi-beneficiary optimizer's a pretty interesting one. It wasn't really something I'd thought about until I've talked with a few advisors about this. Depending on your beneficiaries, there's an optimal way of allocating and designated beneficiaries, depending on the beneficiary tax rates. So maybe we have John, and he's married and making 100,000, and we have Mary, and she's making 500,000. If we were to die in the next year or two, let's say, which hopefully we won't, right? But let's just think about what the split might optimally be. It turns out, in this case, it's not a perfect proportional split against all of our accounts. And so just in order to optimize the net that everybody gets, in this case, doing a slightly different allocation where a lot of the taxable is going to go to Mary, we can actually increase our net benefit to our heirs by $76,000. This is not the kind of thing that you're going to want to plan this out as if you had the money that your plan says you might have in 30 years. It's more about kind of the near term. And so this is the sort of thing that maybe it's every year, maybe it's every couple of years, you're kind of revisiting this concept of are we being optimal with our beneficiary planning? And again, that is more of a across the whole life cycle and really it's once you have some heirs and some assets, so probably it's more like a pre-retirement and into retirement phase. So, that was a super quick look at some of the Penny features. There's a lot more in Penny, and there are also other things in Income Lab. But kind of returning to where we started, we are trying to help in all these phases of life, help you help your clients live the best life they can. Sometimes that is about kind of philosophically, how should we present this to clients? Sometimes in the case of these more focused tools like the Social Security Optimizer or those Penny tools, it's about solving a problem or having a conversation about a little thing today, turning a plan into today's actions. In all cases, what's amazing is the amount of value that an advisor can provide with this approach and certainly with Income Lab, and we are really excited to offer this kind of thing and looking forward to getting all your feedback as you pull more of these tools into your practice. So with that, I know we've got a few more minutes, and we've got a ton of questions. And so again, if you want to include an up vote on things you really want us to hit. Okay. Eric was asking about, "How can I understand these calculations, make sure they're correct?" Let's set you up with an onboarding, Eric. I think we can definitely get you where you need to go, because there's a ton here, and I get it. It's a very valid thing to look at. Let's see here.Maybe we already answered that one as well. How much of this information is available to the client in their login view? So first of all, none of this Penny stuff is available to clients. It's meant for the advisor to use as a tool, maybe with the client, maybe on their own, but not as a client choose your own adventure. In Income Lab itself, you can give the client access, but it's up to you how much access to give them. So you could give them only access to our aggregator, just so that you can pull in balances for accounts that you don't manage. Or you could give them read-only access or even read/write access, where they can do some of the work for you. On that last one, there's been a lot of improvement in how to build plans in Income Lab, so some of that is less useful or less needed than it used to be. So we have these ways of building and updating plans that are absolutely magical. In financial planning, probably there are only two places that AI has had a big impact, a really meaningful impact. One is note takers, and the other would be here. If you're not using the AI Plan Builder, the AI Interviewer, the AI Scribe, the AI Updater, you got to start, because we're not joking when we say we solved data entry. And so the need to have a client fill out an Income Lab plan themselves, not really necessary. Maybe you've already had them fill out a client questionnaire or something like that. Great, just drop it into the Plan Builder. Maybe you had a conversation with them, you've got a transcript from a Zoom meeting, or your own notes. Drop those in here. It'll build a plan for you. This stuff is absolutely amazing. Let's see. Is there a way to see how taxes are being calculated? I'd say between Tax Lab and those Penny tools I show you, you can really dive into some of the depths of that. Yeah, absolutely, David. All right, Robert, we got your point about the mortgages and so on, and we'll look at which of those need to go in automatically, or maybe you need to mark them as, "Hey, I want this as part of my emergency fund." How did you get to Penny? Good point. So we are going to be making this a little bit more easy to find, but go to the Households tab, and then you'll have this little Penny icon. You'll see it in the blue sidebar as well soon, but right now this is where you get to it. And actually... Yeah. Okay. I have one minute left, so I'm looking for a quick one. A lot of these questions are really good questions, and if you want to ask, we do have this AI assistant, which is really an AI expert that you can ask that question. It'll answer the questions, it'll send you to articles and videos that will answer things like, how do I enter the sale of a business? All of these kinds of things. This is a great place to start. You're just going to be chatting with this. We also do have, if you're not able to get that answered, you can go to live support. These are real people who will be chatting with you. You can even do audio, you can share your screen right from there. So first I'd start with the AI assistant, or there's all this self-guided training if you're new to Income Lab. So these more specific questions, there are answers to them. We'll get them for you. But those are some great places to start. So with that, unfortunately, there's a bunch of questions we didn't get to. We'll review them. If there are any that we can reach out to you on, we absolutely will. But thank you so much for joining us, and we hope to see you again at another webinar soon. Take care, everybody.