Income Lab in Production: How Advisors Deliver Planning Without the Data Entry.

Alright, welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us for our fourth and final masterclass of the summer. Let everybody get into the webinar before we get going here. I hope everybody had a great 4th of July weekend. Unfortunately, here in Colorado there are fire bans everywhere, so at least where I was, no fireworks. Let me know in the chat if you had any fun 4th of July experiences. Where we were, they replaced the fireworks with a drone and laser show, which we did not actually get to. I would love for everyone to let me know whether, in the future, that's something worth trying to get to, or if it's just a disappointment when you're looking for fireworks. My 10-year-old was very disappointed we didn't go, but I don't know if it would have been worth it. Looks like most people are in. Just to let people know the concept behind this masterclass: in the past, we've had masterclasses more focused on particular parts of financial planning where Income Lab is involved. Last year we did a Social Security masterclass, which I think was five or six sessions. These are all available on recording, so please let us know and we can point you to them; you'll find them on our website as well, incomelab.io. We've also done ones more focused on retirement planning, taxes, that kind of thing. This year, we're doing more of a survey masterclass. The first session, which is also available recorded, was on financial planning for retirement, and it really went into why the industry needs to move away from probability of success. Then we did a session on tax planning, then another session on Social Security planning. And now this session is going to be a little bit more practical. It's going to be around how to deliver client value, but in a way that's scalable in your practice. There are some real tricks, uses of new technology that people are using, and if you're not, I hope this session will help you try some new things in your practice to see if they help you be more efficient, deliver more value, and so on. I want to start, though, by thinking about why we're doing what we're doing. Income Lab's mission is to revolutionize how people navigate their financial lives so they can live with confidence. This gets to what I've talked about a lot in this masterclass, which is always coming back to: what's the point? What's the goal of what we're doing? Because that can really help us understand and choose the kinds of things, software-wise and so on, to do, if we're always thinking, is this going to help me deliver on that promise of financial planning? The way we think about it, financial planning, retirement planning, is all about helping people live the best lives they can with the resources they have and the time they're given. That's really what it's all about. It's especially clear in retirement, because you're saying, okay, we have these resources, how are we going to deploy them? How much can I spend? Should we make adjustments? Should I fund retirement from this bucket or that bucket? When should I start Social Security? Should I do Roth conversions? There's so much going on in retirement, but it's true in pre-retirement as well, in your working years and the years when you're saving. There are a lot of things we can do, always with that goal of helping people live the best lives they can. To restate these in different ways: we're trying to help them prioritize and optimize. We're trying to help them navigate the ups and downs of life, adjusting when they need to. We're preparing them for the road ahead, giving a realistic vision of what's possible. The way that you frame a plan will tell people how to think about their financial life. So if you're framing it with probability of success and failure, you're telling them this is the proper way to think about this: you will either succeed or fail, and that's the right framing for your life. We argued strongly that that's not true. The way to think about the road ahead is a lot like the rest of your life. There are a lot of things we don't know, but we're going to be okay. We've got a strong plan, and we're going to make adjustments when needed. One of the goals we're looking for here is to give permission to live life, and to do so without regret and anxiety. A thing we haven't talked a lot about, that I'll be talking about a fair amount today, is turning a plan into action. It's great and super important to have a process to do initial planning, then ongoing updates, and to set out that vision. But there are also lots of little things, so today we'll talk about delivering value on a regular cadence of small things that keep things optimized, steer clear of problems, and, in many cases, provide real, measurable value for clients. So they really see the benefit of their relationship with you. Thinking about how we can deliver on that promise of helping people live the best life they can: there are different things that we focus on at different phases in life. Some of you may have seen this before; I presented it a couple of months ago. In retirement, there's this ongoing process of asking the question, how much can I spend? And framing for your clients: what could change that, what would those changes look like, and how do I optimize for taxes? When we talk about a cadence of things you're going to be discussing with clients and delivering that value, that's going to be one of them. Then there are supporting things that may or may not be part of the ongoing presentation: when should we claim Social Security, how should we allocate our investments, what goals should we pursue, how would we absorb adjustments? In the period before retirement, we're starting to paint that picture about what retirement could look like. This is probably five years out, certainly less than five years, maybe as much as ten, but it's that period where you're really thinking, okay, there's this new phase of life coming. The primary and ongoing questions are: how much might I be able to spend? When might I be able to retire? In what way will I retire? Am I going to work less, stop working entirely, or do something different? Am I going to change my behavior now? Maybe I'll start saving less. I've heard that as a possibility for people who are able to make that transition away from the saving muscle to the spending muscle. And again, you have these other supporting conversations: when should we claim Social Security, how should we allocate our investments, how do we optimize savings? In the working years as well, there's a focus on near- and medium-term goals, preparing for pre-retirement goals, and how much should we save for retirement. Those are the ongoing things as part of your cadence. Then the supporting things might be a little more one-off, or even more philosophical conversations: what are our financial values? How do we balance near-term and long-term needs and goals? This is a very common issue for those who are in the thick of some of the more expensive parts of their lives. And again, how do we optimize your retirement savings? In all periods, and we're going to spend some time talking about this today, there is this tactical side of planning, which Income Lab has only recently, in the last couple of months, gotten into. It's a place where a lot of the action actually happens, and it's a place where we can help bridge the gap between your long-term plan and what we're doing today to make that stuff happen. The other thing is, there are some immediate tactical moves, or even pieces of planning, that need to be done on a relatively regular basis, maybe every year or two, that help make sure everybody's on the right footing. So we'll go over a few of those. That's a super quick look at what financial planning is about, what it's for, and what it looks like at each of those three stages, going from retirement backwards: retirement, pre-retirement, working years. We didn't even go into the details, but that already sounded like a lot, right? The fact is, you're having to run a business, and you don't just have one or two clients, so how can we deliver this kind of thing at scale? This is a place we've really focused on for the last year or so, and frankly it's become a really important part of our business. We've gotten amazing feedback on this. In order to scale, we need to do two things. One is we need to adopt a new approach and attitude to data entry, plan creation, and plan updating. This is probably the biggest change in someone's financial planning life that we've seen in the last year. Income Lab, toward the end of last year, was the first financial planning software to roll out a way to build plans without data entry. We have a Plan Builder, a Scribe, and an Interviewer that, using artificial intelligence, allow us to build plans without you having to know exactly where to put things in the software, to find the little white box to put something into. I want to share with you now a little bit of how that works, because for those of you who haven't seen this, it will be life-changing. If you're in Income Lab, in your main household list, go to Add Household. You still have access to the old ways to build plans, typing things in, whether that's with Quick Create or our standard flow, but you have these three new options: the AI Plan Builder, the AI Interviewer, and the AI Scribe. I'm only going to show you the Plan Builder today, but all of these work in the same way. They are looking for information without you having to do work, and then building a plan with that information. So if I go to the AI Plan Builder, you have a couple of options. You can upload files, one file or many, and you can enter text. The limit is really just your imagination here. The main way people are doing this is with previously created financial plans. That's often when someone is just adopting Income Lab. There's often a phase of months, or even a year or two, where maybe you're still using some other financial planning software. What we typically find is that eventually you'll just find yourself using Income Lab, and so that other software will leave your tech stack. But initially, you have this issue of, okay, I want to adopt Income Lab, I want to start talking with people in this way that helps them understand how to live the best life they can. How do I do that without a ton of transition cost, in terms of time for me and my team? Finding your previously created financial plans, just finding those PDFs and dropping them into this Plan Builder, is a great place to start. Then, as time goes on, you'll find that more and more you'll have other options as your primary way of using this. A really common one we hear of is a client intake questionnaire. A lot of advisors who have those already find they work as-is for Income Lab. Others have said they want to add a couple of questions, or tweak a couple, to get the kind of information they really need for the Income Lab plan. That's great, but what's amazing about this technology is we're able to meet you where you are, instead of forcing you to come to where we are. When I give you a form to fill out in software, I'm saying, hey, learn how to use Income Lab, learn where all the inputs are. Eventually you'll probably get there, where you do know where a lot of the stuff is, but with the Plan Builder you can drop files in and it'll build it for you. You don't even have to know how to build it. You can also just drop text in. Maybe you take notes, maybe you do it with audio notes, or you're just typing them in, and it doesn't have to be structured in any particular way. So you could just say: John and Mary Smith, ages 65 and 63, have a million dollars. Oh, I didn't realize I was on caps lock. I guess it wouldn't actually care. Obviously, you could put in a lot more information about their house, all their different resources, their portfolio, and so on. But this is just to show you it can be plain English. The other thing is, you can combine things. Maybe you're dropping in a PDF of a formerly created plan, but for some reason there's no Social Security in there, or you want to say, by the way, they also have a rental property that wasn't in this plan. So you can mix and match. It's really just going to look at the whole thing and try to find information it can use to build the plan. While this is running, which usually takes about 30 seconds to a minute, we've heard some really funny stories. For example, there's an advisor who uses Income Lab whose team, one of their jobs used to be to build the initial Income Lab plan using the client questionnaire. It was going from, okay, I'll get this to you by the end of the day, when I get the chance, to, soon after they received the questionnaire, he was getting the plans within 10 or 15 minutes. He just said, what happened? And that's how he learned about the Plan Builder: his team had found it. And there we go. You'll notice I didn't give state of residence, and I didn't give a retirement date or anything like that, but it's finding it. This was a very simple plan, nothing too interesting, but it's really a magical way to make the actual initial plan building take you almost no time at all. There are other ways to do this as well. The Income Lab Scribe, if you use Zoom, is a Zoom plugin, and it will just listen and essentially build the plan based on things you talk about in the session. It's basically taking notes. As you talk with your client, it has a little thing on the side where it'll note when it finds something for the plan. Oh, you just mentioned an IRA, boom, you'll see a little note that we just found that. If you see it and it's wrong, you can fix it by just talking: no, that wasn't 100,000, it was 120,000, and it'll change. So the Scribe, if you use Zoom, is a really powerful way to do it. After you've done that initial transition to Income Lab, having some system for bringing on new people or updating plans matters, and you can also use the same technology for updating plans. Really, have as one of your goals, as much as possible, eliminating data entry. This is not a thing anybody really loves. So this is my call to arms for everybody: please check out those AI tools. They'll make your life so much better and make this so much more scalable. That's the beginning of how we make this ongoing financial planning process scalable. There is another part of it, though, which is the monitoring and updating. This is the seven-step financial planning process from the CFP Board, and probably a lot of you are very familiar with it. A lot of the first six steps are what we've talked about before: building plans, gathering data, talking about goals, making recommendations, implementing things. Even the plan building we just went over is part of that. But there's another part of scalability, which is monitoring progress and updating. That's step seven. A big part of Income Lab is focused on making step seven a seamless part of your process. Because Income Lab is only about five years old, we built it having talked with advisors and asked them, what's your process, what do you need? Because so many advisors who use Income Lab have ongoing relationships with their clients, part of it was: it's great to build a plan, and of course we want a built plan to be great, but the ongoing updates are super important to keep us on track. Can you automate that as much as possible? So the second thing I would ask you to do is utilize Income Lab's ability to track and monitor a plan automatically. If I go back here to the retired household example, there are a bunch of ways to do this. If you're in the plan itself, go to the three-dot menu and hit track and monitor this plan. If you're in the plan scenarios section for the household, you can have as many plans as you want for a given household, but only one of them can be the primary plan. If it is the primary plan, you can hit track and monitor. To change what the primary plan is, just star it. Once you've hit track and monitor, every month the software itself is going to update things as much as possible. That means it's going to pull in new portfolio balances if you have a data integration. If you don't have a data integration, that's fine; it will project what happened with that account based on the target allocation and the withdrawals that were going to happen from that account. It's not going to be exactly correct, but it should be directionally correct. It'll also update the plan length. As people age, the plan is going to get shorter, but it won't get shorter month for month, because every month that you don't die, you extend your life expectancy a bit. So if at the beginning of the process you're 65 and the plan is 30 years long, ending when you're 95, well, by the time you're 90, it doesn't end when you're 95 anymore; it's probably pushed out. Certainly by the time you're 96, it's not saying, well, you should already be dead, that was our plan. It better have updated. So Income Lab is looking at your current age and sex, your longevity and mortality assumptions, and recalculating how long the plan is, with no need for you to do anything whatsoever. It's taking inflation experience into account, so it knows how much inflation we just experienced last month. Over time, that will accumulate, and eventually it'll be time for a cost-of-living adjustment, and we'll let you know. That's done automatically. There's no reason to keep CPI in your CRM or something. We know that you successfully lived another month, and that changes the mortality risk of the plan. We're updating capital market assumptions and economic context, taking in a bunch of data every month, and we do all of that for you. COLAs, we apply those automatically. This is probably one of the biggest things everybody should be doing every year but probably isn't. Social Security has a cost-of-living adjustment every year. There have been years when it didn't happen, but most of the time it's positive, and some years it's been quite large. This affects every single one of your clients who is receiving Social Security, or will receive Social Security, because even the future benefit is affected by the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment. What should be happening is that every year, toward the end of the year, you should be updating every single one of your plans to change the primary insurance amount that the benefits will be based on. That is a lot of time, and a lot of opportunity for fat-fingering something and making mistakes. So what Income Lab does is we do this for you. Other things: maybe you have a plan that has an income path, something like a retirement smile, a go-go, slow-go, no-go year plan. We're tracking that. When you were in your 60s, you thought you'd spend more; when you're in your late 70s, we thought you'd spend less. That's taken into account, and you're walking through that process automatically. And finally, we're always checking for inflation adjustments or guardrail adjustments. This is done for you automatically. We're tapping you on the shoulder so that you have a real process for number seven. If you weren't allowing software to do this for you, it would be really horrendous to actually provide step seven across a large group of clients and to do it really well. So that's the second part. Part one was building the plans; the second is tracking and monitoring them. If there are things where we don't have a data link or something like that, we have a plan updater where you can put in notes and things and update the plan using AI as well. Going back to how I'm delivering value for clients, there were those core things that are part of most conversations. In retirement, it was, what can I spend? In pre-retirement, it was some other things. So what this does for you is that all the pieces of Income Lab are always available for the client to see. For example, in my in-retirement plan, you have a view that clients might want to see every month, every quarter, twice a year, or so: how am I doing? Am I getting close to a guardrail or not? If I'm in more of a pre-retirement situation, it's probably the Insights Dashboard. As time goes on, I'm going to be walking through this plan. My current income is going to change, my debt-to-income ratio will change, because we're also tracking how they're paying down their debts, whether that's through a link or, if you put in your mortgage, we're tracking the balance of the mortgage. So they'll see over time, automatically, how their debt-to-income ratio is changing, their savings rate is changing, their tax rate. All of that is happening, and their balance sheet will be updating over time. It's not something you need to do. If you've given them access to this, or if you're going over it in a meeting, you'll be able to go to these views. For example, we have this goal of saving one and a quarter million dollars, and currently we're at 64% of that, but as time goes on and that IRA balance changes, they're going to see themselves approaching that goal. For those of you who are not familiar with the Insights Dashboard, we've had it for a while, but it really is a great place to have conversations that are a little less retirement-income-focused. There is stuff here about retirement income; maybe you still want to see your projected retirement paycheck. For these folks it's eight years from now, so they're probably not that interested, but it's nice to have. It's also got other things around emergency fund, estate planning, and insurance, and places for keeping notes and observations and your to-dos. Because some people like to see they've accomplished things, we'll even leave your completed to-do on there; you actually have to delete it if you want it gone, so you can see you've made some progress. That automatic updating applies for the Insights Dashboard as well. I'm going to do a little side note on why automatic updates matter so much for financial planning, and I'll focus on the retirement portion. Derek Tharp and I wrote an article, I think about three years ago now, that looked at another approach to guardrails that was very popular, and rightfully so, called Guyton-Klinger Guardrails. It was basically a way to use withdrawal rates to set guardrails for clients, so they would know that if my withdrawal rate gets too high, I need to take a pay cut, and if it gets too low, I can spend more. So far, so good; nothing conceptually wrong with that approach. The big problem that Derek and I talked about, and that Wade Pfau has talked about, and Karsten Jeske has talked about, these are well-known problems with Guyton-Klinger, or really any withdrawal-rate guardrails, is that it's not updating. Your guardrail definition from early in your plan is the same definition you use next month, next year, next decade. Because of that, what happens is you end up pushing people into very large pay cuts that they actually didn't need to take. That is why having this automatic update system matters, one that takes into account that we've gotten older and our plan has gotten shorter, and maybe economic context, so it knows we just had a big correction in the market. After a 40% drop in the market, it's not equally likely that there's another 40% drop; the economic context has probably changed. All of that gives us the Income Lab approach, the risk-based guardrails approach, which is the gold line here, where yes, sometimes you do make adjustments, but it's not nearly the extreme adjustments that static guardrails like Guyton-Klinger produce. Here's the same exact plan through a financial crisis, one using Income Lab guardrails and one using Guyton-Klinger. Here's the dot-com bubble, which, because it played out relatively slowly, for this plan actually never got a pay cut on the risk-based guardrails approach. But in the Guyton-Klinger approach, it took huge pay cuts. This is a key place where the rubber meets the road on actually having a good step seven, which is not just checking things but updating everything, including age and inflation, all of which would be a real pain if you had to do it by hand. I know we've got a bunch of questions. If you have questions, please put them in the Q&A, and we'll definitely try to hit as many of those as we can at the end here. For the last section, I'm going to talk about this delivering-ongoing-value piece. Part of it was how we scale the creation and updating of plans, and the second was what sorts of things could be in our ongoing cadence for talking with clients, whether you're doing annual meetings, semi-annual meetings, surging, whatever it is. There are five things that are usable across all of your clients: Life Hub, the Insights Dashboard, which we just saw, the Balance Sheet, Penny, which I'm going to talk about in a second, and our Vault, which is coming out very soon; I think it'll be out in a couple of weeks. Life Hub is, for a lot of people, a really important place to return to. It's usable across the entire client life cycle, so it's not retirement-focused. Income Lab originally was very retirement-focused, and there's really nothing better in retirement than Income Lab, but this is something you could use at any phase of life, because it's really a mind map of your entire financial life. This is a place where people return a lot to help clients understand where they are and make sure you have the information right. It's also a bit of a visual CRM, a reminder for you when you're preparing for a meeting: oh yeah, let me see what's in their life; okay, they had that rental property, I forgot about that, I should probably ask if they're still charging $1,000 a month for it. So don't underestimate the usefulness of this piece. It will also help you over time. Here are the investment accounts we have; is that still correct, are there any accounts we missed? Because getting good information about what you can spend and how much you should save is going to require us knowing about those things. We just talked about the Insights Dashboard. It certainly was built with pre-retirees in mind, but it does work in retirement as well, for conversations that are a little less retirement-spending-focused, maybe about net worth and the balance sheet. There's a nice tool I want to share with everybody: understanding the Balance Sheet. It's not just about pure dollars. The dollars are nice, and everybody wants to know their net worth, but we can also look at it in percentage terms to see if we have anything that's lopsided, or if we're well diversified. And maybe most interestingly, there's this ratio view. The ratio view is trying to help you have a conversation with a client about the relationship between their assets and their spending, or their debt and their income. Let's go back to dollar amounts: $150,000 in debt may be absolutely nothing if somebody is making a million dollars a year. If they're making $30,000 a year, it's a big deal. That's what this ratio view is all about. How big is my debt, or how big is my mortgage, compared to what I'm making? Not because you'll spend all of your income on paying off your debt, you probably won't, but if you could put 40% of your income into paying off your mortgage, you could pay it off. That gives you a feel for how big these debts are. In the same way, how big are my assets? Having $10 million is a lot, but it's not that much if I'm spending a million dollars a year. Having $1 million is a lot if I'm spending $30,000 a year. So being able to say, how big are my assets compared to my spending, can be especially useful for pre-retirees, because there are some benchmarks out there for these ratios; you might find them in the FIRE community. In a way, it's a better way to think about your assets and liabilities than just pure dollar amounts. And not only that, but you can see how these change as I go out in the plan. So maybe today my mortgage is 0.4 of my income, but you can see how it goes down over time as I pay it off. This is a lot like Life Hub, in that we not only have today's view, but you can step through the plan and see how things change year by year. Now, getting into some of the other pieces, we have several that I won't spend as much time on today. If you go to two sessions ago, you'd see a bunch on Tax Lab, which is about optimizing taxes. But I want to take a second to talk about three tools: the Pre-Retirement Planner, the Social Security Optimizer, and the Investment Strategy Planner. All of these are available if you go over to Decision Lab, on the left. These are all about those more narrow conversations, and it's all about having a great conversation. I'll look at the Pre-Retirement Planner here, because maybe it's the kind of thing not everybody's seen. It's going to take a look at this plan, and it's going to help you have a conversation about how much should I save and when can I retire? There are a bunch of small pieces where we have some defaults, maybe a target retirement spending level; these can all be played with. The biggest place to look is: how much are you willing to save each month? If you already had savings in the plan, you'd have the option of saying how much you're willing to save each month on top of what's already in the plan, or you could strip out all the savings and just look at, in this case, zero to 3,000. And finally, what range of years would you be willing to retire? Maybe I'll extend this one out. I don't remember their ages. Now it's going to build me a heat map showing how much I could spend in each of these scenarios. What's really different here, going back to the first session of this masterclass, which was about the need to stop using probability of success: if you did this kind of thing with a traditional financial planning tool that focused on probability of success, you'd see how your probability of success would change in these different scenarios. You'd see, oh, if I save less, my probability of success will go down; if I retire later, it'll go up. Well, that is a very abstract way to understand this decision. Really, what this decision is about is, how would it change how much I can spend? Would delaying retirement mean I could spend more? Would retiring earlier mean I have to spend less? Is that amount acceptable? Here we defaulted to wanting $12,000 a month. We see that in this range, retiring in 2032 and saving somewhere between $750 and $2,250 a month is my zone that's closest. But maybe you have a conversation where we say, I could spend a little less if I could retire two years earlier; is $10,800 okay? Could I save a little bit more and retire a lot earlier and handle spending around $10,000 a month? You can see you're starting to have a real, interesting conversation, and you can even move your target. If I say $11,300, maybe that's where I want to be, or maybe it's $11,000; okay, now this is my Goldilocks zone. I mentioned before there are these ongoing conversations, how much can I spend, what would change that; this is more of a targeted conversation. And it's so quick, because I already had the plan set, so I just define the range and now I'm having a conversation. I didn't have to build 25 plans and take a bunch of notes on a spreadsheet. This is a super easy way to have that conversation. We're getting on in time here, so I'm going to skip to some of the things in Penny that are really worth including in your practice, both for ongoing things and for the one-off conversations, and then we'll take some questions. For those of you who haven't seen this, Penny is our tactical planning tool. It's all about last-mile planning. Currently it's only available from the household screen; you just click on this Penny icon, and it'll put you right here. I'm going to focus on the planning and analysis section. The practice intelligence section is also super widely used; practice intelligence is about finding households in your practice who need particular kinds of help. Maybe it's finding a household that could use qualified charitable distributions, or anything like that. In my little toy login here with 15 households, we're not going to talk a ton about that today. Instead, I want to talk about using some of these tools for both ongoing and point-in-time special needs. For example, if you have somebody who is retiring or leaving a job, which could be a pre-retirement case, and you want to look at net unrealized appreciation in their employer plan: if you're anything like me, you've heard of NUA, you can spell it, you kind of remember how it works, but not well enough. So here, all I have to do is put in a few pieces of information. Maybe I've got 200,000 on a 20,000 basis, with 300,000 in other assets, and it's going to find for me right away what my optimal approach is. In this case, doing the NUA strategy is optimal. It's going to save me money; the effective rate is 25% versus 31% doing a straight IRA rollover. I'm going to get a timeline and how to do this. It's going to remind me: okay, I have to do a lump sum, I've got to do the whole thing, I'm going to pay tax on the cost basis. It tells me all of this, and I even get a whole bunch of details, and I can do a quick printout for somebody on this analysis. This is probably not the kind of thing you're going to be doing every year for this client; maybe only once in their life. But we're all about how I can take those little events that happen in people's lives and give you a super-focused tool to get you there. Another example of that is the Medicare IRMAA appeal. Anybody who is hitting 65 for the first time, you need to look at this. I've talked before about why the tactical pieces belong inside your financial planning software: it's because I can pull in data from your plan. Here, we know in this plan that two years ago MAGI was 305. Let's say it was actually 350, and let's say this year it's going to be a little bit lower. As soon as I pick a life-changing event, I can immediately see how much they could save this year if they have a successful IRMAA appeal. I've talked about this as: you need to be doing your tactical work, as much as possible, linked to the plan itself, because the plan itself knows things about the household. It knows when Social Security will start; it knows, in this case, what MAGI was two years ago. That just helps your efficiency hugely. I talk about it as, a stove is an amazing appliance, and it belongs in the kitchen with the knives and the pots and pans. Could you use it in the garage? Yeah, but it's not going to be as convenient to move all this stuff back and forth. That's why we built Penny: the amount of value you can get from doing tactical, last-mile planning from within the plan itself is huge. We will soon have another tool rolling out this month, a withdrawal planner. Every time I talk to an advisor about this, it's the stuff you're doing day to day. Somebody calls up and says, I need $50,000, I need $10,000, where am I going to take it from? We need to know not only the tactical stuff, but also, what's the whole plan for this year, what's the plan for next year, what's our safe harbor on taxes? Doing that from within your planning software is a huge time saver, and a risk manager as well. The other thing I'll note for this kind of tactical work, getting back to efficiency, is that Penny does a lot of the stuff you might have used a full plan for. It gives you a tax planning report; it allows you to upload a tax return for an existing household, or for a household where you don't even have an Income Lab plan, and you can get to work analyzing different changes and things you might make. Here, I've pulled in the household plan as a baseline. Then I copied it and said, what if we moved to California, what would that look like? It would add about $10,000 in taxes. Or maybe I want higher muni bond interest, so I go to my investment income and increase my muni bond interest, and I'll immediately see the changes coming through. I can also print this out. I can add up to three of them, create a report, do a comparison, and see the differences, and again print that out as a nice little report for the client. So if they're talking with you about, hey, we have a move planned, what would that look like for us, boom, you're immediately able to provide that for them. The really cool thing here is that not only can you do that with an uploaded tax return, but you don't even need the tax return if you have an Income Lab plan. One advantage of the Income Lab plan is that it is a plan for this year and on. A tax return is super useful, but it's a historical document. Every single time, the most recent 1040 you have for somebody is from last year. You can upload that, but if this was a 2025 or even a 2024 tax return, one thing I can look at is: how do things change if I take the numbers from 2024 but apply them in 2026? Essentially, what Penny's allowing you to do is all of that tactical, tax-analysis work, the sort of things you could do in a holistic plan, but you don't actually need the tax document. It's great if you have it, but you don't need it. The last one I'll hit here is more of an ongoing piece, which is beneficiary planning. I think this is one that's not really well appreciated. If you go to estate planning, this is one I would definitely suggest building into your process to revisit every year or two. We have some great tools in here for navigating a single beneficiary, or figuring out how SECURE Act rules apply. I'm going to use the Multi-Beneficiary Optimizer here. It's going to pull in all of the accounts in my plan with their current balances and their types, so I've got a taxable account, a traditional IRA, and a 401(k). Now, if I create my beneficiaries here, maybe John's a school teacher and Mary's an orthopedic surgeon, and my goal is to have a 50-50 split of this money, I want to take everybody's tax situation into account, and I want to do that for this year. I'm not planning for 30 years from now. My balances could be very different 30 years from now; maybe I've done Roth conversions and I don't even have an IRA or a 401(k) anymore, or it's very low. Maybe John and Mary are making very different amounts 30 years from now. That's not what the plan is. The plan is, am I positioned to optimize this if things don't go as planned and I die soon? So optimizing the split versus proportional adds $80,000 in net benefit to my heirs. It's a small thing, but that's real money. I wouldn't obsess about it; we don't have to do it every year, maybe every two years, we just revisit this and redo our beneficiaries. This is a place where, again, working with you as an advisor puts real money into the plan, real value for their loved ones. Our goal here is 50-50. In order to do that, we're going to give John 100% of the IRA, split the 401(k) about 50-50, and then the taxable account is going to go to Mary. I don't have a lot more time left, so I'm going to see if I can hit some questions here. Are you able to show a preview of the Vault? I probably could find it here, and I can see if I can show it to you, Joe, but if not, we will have a launch webinar and a lot of materials on it. It's going to be great. Guardrails net-of-cash view: that is definitely on the roadmap, for sure. Thank you for that. With respect to building plans using the Plan Builder, Scribe, or Interviewer: is it just intended to build out the general framework, and do you go back and audit the inputs for accuracy? Great question. What happens is you get as much information as possible in there through those systems. Let me go back and find one of them. The very first thing you're given is this: oh, I didn't even mention the state of residence, I didn't mention anything about retirement, and you're given these. It's even saying, well, we think it's ordinary income, is that right? And then once I hit create plan, it actually takes me to Life Hub, so it's kind of a second chance to get a look at it. So I would say there is an audit step. How heavy the audit is depends on the plan itself. There are some very specific things you're not going to get via the AI. Maybe you want to do some really specific distribution plans or something to add. I do say we're eliminating data entry; I'd say we're probably 90 to 95% of the way to delivering on that vision. Most people are going to want to double-check the AI's work, of course. So how much efficiency is really gained for the people using this? It is, like I said, easily 90 to 95% efficiency. Somebody in one of our reviews was saying there's a lot of hype around AI, and this is one of those places where it really is life-changing. So yeah, it's definitely worth it. There's a question about the COLAs. We apply those in January. For Social Security in particular, they are actually announced usually in October or November. We don't want to promise that we'll put them in as soon as they're announced, because sometimes, and this has happened to us before, there was actually a month or two where there was no CPI number, because the government was shut down. So we apply them in January. For Social Security, the first time you see that effect in a check is actually in February, but already the plan, as of January, will show the right numbers for the future. That's when the COLAs are applied. Great question. Okay, there are two more I'll hit here. Any plan to pull in actual year-to-date income, dividends, capital gains, and so on? Yes, absolutely. Because of Penny, your plan has assumptions about dividends and turnover and interest and all that for future years, and no one objects to that; five years from now, who knows what it'll be? An assumption is fine. But for this year, when you're doing that final, last-mile piece, for example a Roth conversion analysis, I can go to inputs here and really dial in. I can say, here's what my plan has, but this year interest rates went up, so I got 10,000 in dividends. Or I went to less dividend-paying stock, so that's lower; I had more international stock, so that's higher. How much cap gains did I really create this year? It was lower, because I didn't sell as much. And I'm immediately updating this graph, and then I can print it and see the cost of the Roth conversion and so on. So you're asking, wouldn't it be nice if you could pull those in from your custodian? Yes, that's absolutely what we plan to do. And that withdrawal planner is also in the works. Lastly, how do I add Scribe to Zoom? Go to the households list, hit AI Scribe, and then click Launch Zoom. There is an option in Zoom, and it's impossible to show you Zoom while using Zoom, but there is a place; I think it's called, yeah, I can't actually even see it right now. This should take you to the right place, though. I believe you can also ask the AI assistant how to install it in Zoom. It's super easy. So with that, I know we're a couple of minutes over. Thank you, everybody, for attending all of our masterclasses this summer. We'll look through the questions; I know we got a bunch of others, and we will send email copies of the slides. You can always take a look at the recordings of these. Have a great rest of July, everybody, and we'll see you again soon.