Boldin vs Retirement Scenario Explorer

What Boldin does best

Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) is the deepest consumer retirement planner you can buy. Its tax modeling — Roth conversions, Social Security taxability, state-by-state retirement tax variation — is genuinely impressive, and we say that as a tool that competes on exactly that ground. They've built support for advanced techniques most calculators don't touch: backdoor Roth, mega backdoor Roth, healthcare cost projections by state, IRMAA brackets, even rental property income modeling. If retirement planning is a craft you enjoy and want to spend hours on, Boldin rewards that effort.

Where Boldin doesn't fit for most people

Boldin runs $144 per year, ongoing — $1,440 over a decade for a tool most subscribers open a few hours a year. Setup takes 1–2 hours of milestone configuration before your first meaningful answer. Its AI assistant is a recent addition and feels bolted on rather than conversational. And there's no path to “just give me the answer” — Boldin is built around exploring scenarios in detail, not delivering a verdict in five minutes.

One methodology difference worth knowing about, because it's the invisible one: Boldin's 2025 update moved its Monte Carlo simulation to arithmetic (average) returns — documented openly in their own methodology post, to their credit. Our engine reads the return you enter as the lived, compounded rate — the way published forecasts quote returns — so the typical simulated future grows at exactly that rate. The practical effect: the same number typed into both tools means two different things, so check which one each tool expects before comparing their scores. We wrote up the full anatomy of cross-tool differences in Why Retirement Calculators Disagree.

Boldin is built for people who want to be their own retirement architect. We're built for people who want clarity quickly — and don't want to subscribe to anything.

Why two apps can give different answers

If you run the same plan in Boldin and here and get different numbers, the gap usually comes from assumptions, not from either app getting the math wrong: how fast the money grows after you retire, inflation, how long the plan runs, and whether the simulations test bad markets history never happened to produce. One sample plan in our app scores anywhere from 62% to 100% depending only on those choices. We explain why we chose each of ours in Why Retirement Calculators Disagree, or try your own numbers under four sets of assumptions in our free calculator, no signup needed.

Head to head

Based on each product's public documentation and pricing pages, verified July 2026. If we've mischaracterized anything, tell us and we'll correct it.

Why people choose Retirement Scenario Explorer

If you've tried Boldin and bounced off the setup, or the subscription doesn't match how often you'll actually use it, you get the same class of calculation engine here — Monte Carlo simulation, tax-aware withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversion analysis, stress testing — without the 90-minute setup or the recurring charge. $79 once, yours forever, and the free tier runs the full simulation with no account at all. The AI Advisor is the conversation layer Boldin's assistant isn't: ask anything about your plan in plain English, get an answer that knows your actual numbers.

Common questions