5 Popular Retirement Planning Apps


As an investor, you may have multiple 401(k) or IRA accounts, or perhaps some of your retirement savings are parked in taxable accounts.

Having multiple investments accounts can make it difficult to track and evaluate the growth and performance of your investment portfolio.

Retirement tracking and planning apps offer projections and reports, based on simulations and advanced calculations. You can easily keep a track of all your investment accounts in one place.

Here are five retirement planning apps that make it to the list as our favorites.

Personal Capital

Personal Capital makes it to our list of the best retirement planning apps as it offers many advanced tools totally free of cost. Apart from the savings planner, the four investment-focused tools on offer are:

  • Retirement Planner
  • Investment Checkup
  • Net Worth Calculator
  • Fee Analyzer

It is easy to link your bank and brokerage accounts to Personal Capital’s Net Worth Calculator. The Investment Checkup tool, on the other hand, can assess your investment portfolio’s risk and provides a comparison of its performance to your target.

Wealthfront

Wealthfront is known for its robo-advisor investment platform. It created a ripple in the market with its launch of free financial planning tools in its app.

Users can chart out their financial future with the help of cutting-edge AI-driven advice, based on data analysis.

Wealthfront’s retirement planning app does not need manual input from the user. What it does once you link your bank, loan, and brokerage accounts and then calculate your savings and project your net worth.

Another aspect that you can see is how a delay or modification in your financial goals can impact your savings which can be detrimental in an inflationary environment which is the case now.

Vanguard

Vanguard is an investment firm that offers low-cost index funds. The retirement planning calculators on offer are:

  • Retirement Income
  • Retirement Plan Loan
  • Retirement Nest Egg

The company’s Retirement Plan Loan calculator is a unique tool that helps you measure your 401(k) loan cost. Several variables that the calculator considers in arriving at a conclusion are:

  • Loan amount
  • Loan term
  • Interest rate on the loan
  • Interest rate of alternative lender
  • Yearly return on savings

This unique calculator can also compare the cost of your loan when you forego returns on investment by borrowing from your retirement savings plan to the cost of interest you would bear by borrowing from an online lender or a bank.

Stash

A fintech company known for its fractional investing options and automatic savings tools, Stash offers a reliable and efficient retirement calculator.

Answer a small questionnaire on the app about your age, income, and existing savings, to see what your projected net worth will be at retirement and how it compares to your savings rate goals. Stash also provides suggestions based on its calculations.

Apart from these tools that are free to use, you can also access the company’s full suite of investing tools with plans that start from as low as a dollar a month.

Betterment

As a popular robo-advisor platform, Betterment makes the grade as one of the best retirement planning apps owing to its free Retirement Savings Calculator. This calculator serves you a quick questionnaire which when answered, will generate a graphical projection of your retirement annual spending.

The company has expertise in tax advice, and you can find tax-efficient rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting strategies.