Financial services firms are broadening the scope of their retirement advice tools and planning a major push to help advisers understand them. That’s the key takeaway of an industry survey by Hearts & Wallets, a research firm that tracks retirement income trends.
The new tools give users get a better grasp of their retirement options, including when to take Social Security and how to achieve “tax optimization of withdrawals,” says Chris Brown, a partner of Hearts & Wallets. In the past, most of the retirement planning tools did little more than help users calculate “replacement rates,” or how much money they would need to have saved to replace a given percentage of their income. Today’s tools are more focused on helping users understand the tradeoffs of various retirement options.
