Comprehensive financial planning software means that it covers everything in financial planning. The financial plan software on Toolsformoney.com is not comprehensive, because there are no tax or estate planning software modules.

This is because there are too many cheap tax programs that excel in this on the market already. Always being plagued with implementing estate planning updates and tax law changes, which happen more than annually, is one of the biggest reasons comprehensive financial planner software is so expensive, cumbersome, and full of bugs.

For the estate planning module, we recommend Leimberg's Number Cruncher. It has the most accurate numbers, and their reports print and fit nicely into financial plans made with this software. This way you'd get the best results possible - way better than NaviPlan.

The software developer for Toolsformoney.com (as you can read in the middle on the info page) grew up living in the world of using comprehensive and integrated financial planning software. He used it daily to do his job as a paraplanner, case writer, and investment portfolio manager. He's used and tried everything on the market since the late '80's.

Things have not changed hardly at all in this world, because they are all built around basic financial concepts that rarely change. The only things that really change are tax laws and numbers. Things like college funding, life insurance needs, and retirement planning has been essentially the same since it first came out.

Next, We've Been There and Done That

Unlike Other Financial Plan Software Vendors:

▪ These financial tools excel in working like things do in the Real World - by allowing control over most everything, having the flexibility to analyze virtually any investment portfolio/financial planning/retirement planning scenario, and helps keep financial planners out of compliance trouble.

For consumers, it helps you invest more wisely, doesn't overwhelm you with meaningless text, charts, numbers and reports, and gets the jobs done better than if you were to hire a high-paid financial consultant.

▪ You can usually get your financial software delivered via e-mail in less than an hour.

▪ You don't have to go online to log into a server to get any work done. Everything is done in MS Excel on your hard drive. So you can ensure all of your client data will never leave your control by simply putting a password on your PC (or the spreadsheets).

Who knows who's looking at your clients as marketing leads when you go online to do your work. Even if the company swears they protect your privacy, a clever employee could be selling data to lead-generation firms as a part-time job (without the company ever knowing).

▪ There are regular periodic marketing sales when you can get huge discounts.

▪ Professionals don't need a FINRA Series 7 license to manage money using this investment software. A Series 6 is all that's required.

▪ Other than subscribing to the monthly updated mutual fund recommendations, there are no ongoing passwords or licensing fees, so you only pay once, and you can use these financial planning tools forever at no additional cost. Most vendors charge over 50% of the software's initial cost every year. You'd only pay a small update fee to get the annual tax numbers updated, or if you wanted new features.

▪ Support on these money calculators never expires. Most financial planning software modules have three prices for each level of support: A discounted price for experienced financial planner software users who don't need it, an e-mail supported price, and a full phone and e-mail supported price. You choose instead of paying expensive built-in support fees that you'll probably never use.

▪ It's easy to get the programs to work on more than one computer, because you can just burn a CD or e-mail the programs to yourself as attachments. So if you're half way done making a retirement plan in the office, and then have to go home, you can just e-mail it to yourself, and then pick up where you left off at home. Then send it back to your office when you're done.

▪ There are no indirect costs with this financial plan software, such as updates, training, software add-ons, or hardware/database/network upgrades.

▪ This is the place for people who are annoyed by e-commerce: This website and money calculators are 100% clean. This means there are no cookies, ads, Java, scripts, Active-X, pop-ups, redirects driving you to marketing sites, putting you on junk e-mail or phone lists, slow-loading graphics, it won't put web shortcut icons on your desktop, alter your favorites list or browser, or make you go online to do your work.

▪ You're not going to be "marketed to" once you're a customer. There's a small army of under-employed people wanting to make an easy living by telemarketing and spamming the clients of financial software companies. They either want to contact current customers to increase sales, get referrals, or use the data to sell to others (like spam lists or competitors). We're contacted by these people quarterly, and we always say no (we send them to this page). So nobody is going to call or spam you if you buy investment software from us.

MS Money and Quicken also outsourced their support to India. Profiles was doing so well that NaviPlan bought them in Sept '06. In August '07, they made their users upgrade to their new version of Profiles, which costs around $1,200 annually. People that didn't want to upgrade were deliberately abandoned because the old version stopped working, rendering all of the past work of inputting client data useless (so they lost everything with no hope of recovering any data). Every time you read an article about NaviPlan and Financial Profiles regarding retirement distribution analysis, the conclusion is, "They're working on it, and it should be coming out any year now." This is has been going on for decades. This means the industry leaders don't have, nor will they be making, even the most basic required functions that you need now to adequately plan for you clients' retirement. So it makes no sense to spend over $1,000, and then around $500 annually, to buy and use software that does not even perform the most needed functions that clients are paying you for.

Being Based on MS Excel Solves Critical Issues

If you like Microsoft Excel, then you'll love this financial software because you get the best of everything that's important:

◦ Control over most all numbers in every year, flexibility, control over printing, functionality, power, both modularity and integration, operating system and computer compatibility, minimal bugs, and speed.

◦ You can use Excel's built-in "Goal Seek" function to do all the "What If?" scenarios and "Goal Seeking" functions that any other financial planning software can do, plus dozens more that they can't do.

◦ You can easily send just the results to clients via e-mail. How to do that is explained at the bottom of this page.

◦ Input cells tell you what to input. Also, most every input cell uses validation, so when you make a mistake, you'll get an error message that tells you what you did wrong, and how to fix it. This makes it easier to use.

◦ Most everything is transparent so you can trace all mysteries back to your input (ever try figuring out how NaviPlan comes up with numbers?). Most all of the calculation sheets show the flow of calculations going from left to right, in a logical, easy-to-follow manner, so you can see exactly what's going on.

◦ Our prices are so low because Excel makes it easy to program, thus eliminating the need to employ expensive software programmers (that usually have no education or experience in financial planning or investment management).

Plus they spend most of their time keeping up with Windows operating system updates, compiler changes, and maintaining extremely complex "code." All of this has nothing to do with making financial plans.

This is what's responsible for making things not work, crashes, fixes, bugs, patches, mysteries, numbers not adding up, integration that doesn't work, and time consuming support calls. These costs, which are around half of the prices you pay, are just passed on to you, and add no value to your life or your financial planning practice.

º The usual financial plan software is usually written in a programming language that's about to become obsolete, which means the software company will have to spend a lot of time and money to rewrite it, and of course they pass these costs on to you (and you don't see any benefit from that).

Even if it isn't rewritten, there are frequent "compiler updates and changes" that make the programmers have to spend resources just keeping things working. The more resources are "wasted" in these activities, the more problems, and then they pass these costs on to you. When financial software is based in Excel, all of these problems go away.

◦ There is nothing your computer can do to make the programs not work correctly. In personal finance software that's not written in Excel, the first thing that happens when you call for support is that you're asked a series of questions about your computer. This is their way of trying to blame their non-functional software on your computer. This will never happen with our software.

◦ You can make all the color charts that any other personal finance software vendor has. So if you want to show something to clients that you're used to seeing in other financial planner software (e.g., explanatory text or images of smiling people mixed in with the numbers), then you can just paste it in, and make it better.

Most other vendors won't let you modify any of the pages you'd print and show to clients. You have complete control over the results with these money spreadsheets.

◦ While most vendors can take years to implement solutions to problems, we can usually do it the same week (and if you find or suggest something, you'll get a freebie). Find a bug in NaviPlan or make a great suggestion and see how many years it takes to get 'er done (and even if you come up with a major find, they're not going to do anything to thank you).

◦ This investing software isn't full of bugs (that never get fixed), works on any PC, Macs with Excel/Word installed, any version of Windows, all with no dangerous installation setup procedures. It will always work no matter what version of Windows you have, or what changes you make to your computer.

◦ The usual kind of financial planner software is extremely hard to program a lot of functionality (the capability to perform a lot of useful functions) into the program because the combination of integration and comprehensiveness makes it way too complex for the programmers to cope with.

Most programmers are just following the directions of their financial bosses, and while competent to program, are basically clueless on what they're doing and why they're doing it. This is because their degrees are not in anything financial, so they don't know anything about financial planning or investment management. They also have never met a real client, and so they have no idea what they need and want to see.

◦ The usual financial planner software usually has a convoluted installation/updating procedure, and that usually overwrites Windows (DLL) files to make it work right.

This causes all kinds of bugs where it locks up your computer, or otherwise crashes it and makes you reboot, causes other programs to stop working right, puts icons/favorite/shortcuts all over your desktop and browser to drive you to their websites where they collect all kinds of information about you to sell to spammers and other marketing people, etc.

When this happens, the financial plan software usually stops working when you go to Microsoft's website to update your operating system (because you're overwriting files that the software installation procedure overwrote).

So there is always an endless parade of "patches" to fix an endless array of bugs. Humans being what they are means that all of these programs are filled with bugs and things that don't work right, and will never get fixed. Just getting the software company to admit their programs have the bug in the first place is like trying to pull the horn off an angry rhino. The first thing they ALWAYS do is find some way to blame it on you and your computer so they can get you out of their hair.

◦ Good financial planning software programmers are usually young, expensive, and flaky; so they quit all the time, which adds to the problem of bugs never being fixed. These kinds of software people rarely fix their bugs unless most all of their customers complain, or the bug causes computers to crash. Fixing the endless list of minor bugs is usually on the bottom of to do lists; because the bosses (salesy marketing types) are always pushing the software people to add new features that they think will make sales increase in the short-run. There's none of that when it's in Excel.

Programmers are going to whine profusely about every new function the bosses want them to do, so they always want more money, less stress, and a shorter work week, or they will quit. This is why are all of these programs cost way too much money, don't work right, are full of bugs, and don't have close to the functionality needed to illustrate what happens in the Real World. This will never change, especially in an environment of flat-to-down markets where people that want and need investment software to do their jobs are afraid to spend the money.

The solution to ALL of these problems nowadays is to just use an existing software platform where billions of people-hours and billions of dollars have already been expended on perfecting the platform the software runs on. In the case of Toolsformoney.com, these platforms are the same as the ones millions of people use daily - they're called Microsoft Word and Excel.

Once you have lived in both worlds, you'll agree that the old-school thinking of having to buy the most expensive software to get good results just doesn't apply anymore. Now that computers are so fast, Excel is just too slick to use anything else for serious number crunching.

◦ The usual financial plan software is usually very hard, cumbersome, and confusing to operate, and takes a long time to learn how to use it. Some are so hard that experienced paraplanners need to be hired, which are hard to train/license/manage, expensive, and then quit on you all the time. They usually quit right after you send them to expensive software training classes, because it's there they learn they don't want to spend their life working with terrible software. There's none of that when it's in Excel.

◦ Most input cells change color after you input data to help organize your work.

The Main Themes of the Site and Financial Plan Software

▪ Being able to account for everything that happens to real people in the Real World. This is the only suite of financial plan software that allows you to input and account for ALL of life's details. The devil is in the details, and so this is the only way to beat him.

▪ Being able to control every dollar in every year. This is how you get financial plans that track with what will actually happen many years into the future.

▪ Being transparent enough to enable tracing of all mysteries back to their input. When you can't figure out why you obtained a particular result in EVERY other vendor's financial plan software, you're stuck with a mystery and there's nothing you can do about it (even if you call and talk with an expert).

▪ Having total control over the way the "presentation pages" look and feel. These are the results pages that a financial planner would present to their clients. If someone doesn't like they way things look as they are, they can make any change they want. Graphs and text can be resized or moved anywhere, columns and rows can be easily sized/deleted/inserted/hidden, and images or boilerplate text can be copied into it.

▪ We have dozens more of the little tools to do all of the oddball jobs people want and need done.

▪ We also strive to get the facts and truth out about how the industry really works, and how to avoid common traps, abuses, conflicts of interest, and the self-enrichment schemes of the major players. We come down hard on the state of the investment and financial planning industry, the competition, and the status quo. This isn't because we're trying to make more money, but because we're trying to get the information out there in order to be a positive influence to help change things for the better.

We're the Only Vendor Dispensing Practical Investment Advice

We're the only investment software vendor that employs a long-time CFA Charterholder (and ex-CFP) that's been managing money with superior Real World results since 1988. He's personally witnessed thousands of clients' reactions when presenting most all competing financial plans.

This is how we know what people want and need, why it can handle many times more scenarios that people want you to illustrate for them, why you have complete control over asset allocations, and why you have total control over every number in every year in most of the modules.

We're the only investment software vendor that has a turnkey system for managing money along with a long-term track record of historical returns. No other financial plan software vendor has a system that will create and implement suitable investment portfolios all the way down to recommending actual investments to buy.

This is also why:

◦ Our investment portfolios have such outstanding long-term returns.

◦ Our asset allocator software matches investment portfolios to the lives of people better than anything else.

◦ You can subscribe to get ongoing mutual fund picks.

◦ Anyone can hire us on a fee-only basis to get his or her money managed, with or without financial planning advice with no conflicts of interest. Financial professionals can get unique investment/financial planning services performed. For example, creating proper portfolio benchmarks to see how your money management methods are really working.

◦ If you buy support, you can call and talk to a seasoned expert and get advice on all kinds of things with no conflicts of interest.

Asset allocation models are the quickest and easiest way to do a great job managing money for smaller clients (under $200,000 for example. Asset allocation software for larger clients is here.).

All you need to do is use the investment fact finder to determine the client's investment risk tolerance, and then allocate using the appropriate investor model using the mutual fund picks (or ETF/Index funds or use your own investment picks). Unlike most all other investment software, this is a turnkey system, which allows you to actually manage money for clients without having to use or buy any other software.

Investment software like Morningstar, Ibbotson (which was bought out by Morningstar in 2006), Advisoryworld, and MS Money have all of the tools to allow one to manage money, but only after the user already has a methodology to do so. The investment manager still needs to develop an actual system to do the work of portfolio management before they can use their investing software to put it into practice. They offer little-to-no system to actually do anything useful because:

▪ It's too hard to program and maintain,

▪ They're too cheap to employ real money managers to help them come up with a feasible system, so they don't know how,

▪ They're afraid of compliance problems and don't want to be on the hook as being labeled a fiduciary (because they know their buggy software will just get them into trouble),

▪ And last but not least, most investment managers eventually come up with their own way of managing money anyway and don't want to use whatever concept investment software vendors come up with. So even if they did spend the resources to develop a working system, very few of their customers would actually buy and use it. So from their point of view, spending the resources on this would be a low-profit margin endeavor.

In other words, all of the usual investment software vendors have tons of tools and data that are great to combine assets into portfolios, backtest to compare past results, and support peoples' money management methodologies. But they offer no way of actually coming up with a system of doing anything useful in the first place. There is no step-by-step process one can follow to do anything that will get decent investing results over time. If one already has a money management concept or methodology, then there usually are step-by-step instructions on how to implement that program into their software to spit out meaningful reports with current data. But one has to develop their own way of managing money in the first place to use it.

In other words, none of the usual investment software vendors have a "turnkey system" for investing people's money. A turnkey system means that you could just collect data from the client, run it through the program, and the result would be an actual portfolio that you can buy (make sell and buy trades using actual mutual funds). We're the only investment software vendor that offers this kind of turnkey system.

For example, take Morningstar Principia. One can input all of a client's current holdings and come up with slick pie charts showing the asset allocation mix that prints out nice and easy. Then one can use all kind of tools to generate its historical performance (assuming everything was bought and held since inception, which doesn't account for any past trades, which results in a gross misrepresentation of performance). Then one can input what investments they think clients' should have for a proposed/recommended portfolio, and then these two portfolios are compared.

This is the point - the user has to come up with what they think the proposed investment portfolio should be BEFORE it can be input into the program. The program DOES NOT make these kinds of actual Real World recommendations.

After this is all done, then these reports have all of the popular Sharpe ratios and dozens of other cool statistics. which are useless when it comes to getting decent investment performance in the future.

The proposed portfolio usually has better returns when using this kind of sales method, so clients usually say yes and buys. This is how the vast majority of investments have been sold in the past. Because it works and is easy, there appears to be no change in sight.

No methodology is used to determine which asset classes, or how much of each, people should own considering his or her life situation. This is the most important factor that goes into matching portfolios to people lives, so they can get the performance they need.

If there is, you're either limited to a too small number of major asset classes the investment software vendor has hard coded into the program (and can't be changed), or the user can input what they think are the best asset classes to use (which encourages market timing because people want to overweight sectors they think are going up at the moment).

Both of these situations usually lead to sub-par investment performance. Managing money this way is about as useless as using the asset distribution software we sell, but looks much nicer.

Because of the pathetic state of the industry (details are in the investment eBook), financial planners usually just input proposed mutual funds from whatever mutual fund families either they, or their Broker Dealer, likes or makes the most money from. This usually results in an "all American Funds" portfolio. This isn't because financial planners are crooked or evil, it's just because they just don't know any better, don't have the time to figure all this out, are being led in that direction, and so they just don't understand.

If one were to limit their mutual fund picks to just one fund family, then Oppenheimer Funds would be way more popular than American Funds. BDs don't encourage their financial planners to use all Oppenheimer Funds because they don't kickback as much money as American Funds. There's no hard proof of this, because BDs won't even tell their top-producing salespeople how much they make from various fund companies. Only a select few at the top of BDs know about the deals they cut with mutual fund wholesalers, and so it's one of their most closely guarded secrets.

It would take a massive rule enforcement undertaking from regulators to put a stop to this, by forcing BDs to report how much money they make from all of their vendors. Since there's no public outcry, nothing will ever happen. There's no public outcry because both investors and investment managers are clueless about computing and comparing investment portfolio performance. Plus the big mutual fund and life insurance companies have "paid off their politicians" to maintain the status quo decades ago. There's no change in sight, so we'll be living with this problem for another century.

About Database and Online Investment Software

Please note that our investment software does not come with an asset database (of returns, risk, standard deviations, correlation coefficients, etc.). You'll need to subscribe to an online service, or buy expensive investment software to get such a database. Then you'll be able to see and print out detailed historical reports on investment vehicles like mutual funds.

It also does not go online to access investor's current holdings. So you have to input everything manually. The only software module this would apply to anyway is the asset allocation software. Even though this may seem like a huge disadvantage, seasoned professionals know it isn't because:

· It only takes a few minutes to input data anyway. How long does it take to type a name? You can also link the modules to minimize redundant input.

· To have this capability and/or a database of historical data, you'll need to spend around five times as much as our investment software costs. Then they're going to ding you about half of that annually in update fees, which we don't charge.

· In addition to spending more on the financial software, there are costs in time, work, and money to keep the online infrastructure working. In larger offices, a full-time person is usually employed to do nothing but maintain these systems. Keeping everything working so it will actually go online and populate client allocations with current holdings, takes over ten hours of work weekly. This is several times the amount of time it takes to manually input client data.

· If you've been doing it like this for the purpose of keeping asset allocation reports updated with fresh data, then you know how many mistakes there are, and how much time it takes to fix them (sometimes you can't even fix them because you can't manually override the online data).

· From the time the reports are finalized to the time they're presented, the values will be off by just as much as if you did it all manually because market values change daily. The only way to keep it fresh is to print it out the day of the client meeting. The time it takes to do all of this rework is several times as much as inputting it all manually in the first place.

· Online databases don't have all of the client's assets, so you always have to manually input things anyway. The only other option is to leave things out (like 401(k)s). Clients do not want you to do that because you're too lazy to do a few more minutes work.

· Going online to do important work means being vulnerable to the many things that will stop your work. You may not be able to get online and use the program because of your internet access, computers, or servers being down. Then the vendor's software, computers, or servers could be down, or just slow because too many people are using them. Plus doing things online is just slow even if you have a fast connection.

· Keeping client data online means that other people can know about it. How long will it be before they start sending them junk mail or marketing to them?

When we were working for financial planners in person, we did things both ways for years. After a while, we stopped the whole online thing because it wasn't worth the trouble and the reports we generated with our software added much more value.

The "Holy Grail" of financial planning software or investment software will never happen, regardless of advances in technology. Everybody wants magic software that can read your mind and that eliminates all work, like inputting, by going online and populating software with names, exact perfect current holdings of everything they own, planning input and assumptions, and then spitting out perfect looking reports by just clicking the print icon one time. Forget it - that will never happen!

The trade off between ease of use and value will always be there. Our software is not magic like others profess to be, and is not the easiest or quickest to use, but it provides the most value. To realize value people will pay you for, you're going to do have to do you know what - work!

About Financial Plan Software that Tires to Do Everything

The end result of financial planning software vendors that have tried to "do everything for everyone" is already out there. These vendors have the capability of performing many of these tasks, but the end result is that it doesn't do hardly any of them very well. It does them adequately, but doesn't excel in any of them.

The goals of this kind of financial software, from the client's point of view, are to make the best financial plans possible, and make investment portfolios match client's lives as closely as possible. Vendors that makes expensive financial planner software that does "everything" for you, may make your life easier, but it does not excel in what clients' want most from you - Real World results they can use to make important financial decisions that will effect their lives for decades to come.

This financial plan software excels in actually doing the financial planning and investment management work better than any other vendor, for a fraction of the cost. We don't want to get bogged down in all of the very expensive and time-consuming areas that other vendors already have covered. We want to continue to be the premier source for financial planning software that does the "heavy lifting," the most profitable tasks, the most important tasks, getting the most correct answers to the big questions people will pay to get answered, and of course, actually getting outstanding investment returns with low risk. This is where the real red meat is.

Other vendors are like a 10-course vegetarian meal - lots of different tasty things decorated with lots of useless fluff, but no satisfying fatty meat. If you went to a restaurant and got a 10-course vegetarian meal with lots of different tasty things decorated with lots of useless fluff, and paid $100; and then the next day went to one where you got a one-pound fresh lobster tail and a one-pound hunk of filet mignon both for $10, which one would you go back to? The one that satisfied what you needed you the most for the lowest price, of course. That's the best metaphor we can think of to describe the difference between us and the NaviPlan-type vendors. People want and need big chunks of the best juicy red meat, and so that's what we excel in.

So we recommend buying this suite of financial planner software, and then in addition to that, buy software from other vendors that excel in doing all of the other tasks. Then not only will you get financial software that excels in everything, but it will probably end up costing less than buying financial software that tries to do everything for everyone. It may be harder to work with and cause more inputting of client data, but the bottom line is that you're going to be able to do much better jobs for clients - and that's how you get paid and survive. Clients will give money to, and will refer their friends and family to, those that can deliver the best results at the lowest cost. We offer Tools For Money that gets the best Real World results, at the lowest cost, no contest.

We Have Superior Monte Carlo Methodology

The way both our retirement software, and college planner software, performs Monte Carlo simulations is far superior to all other vendors. This means lower risk for you and your clients.

Basically, most other vendors just iterate the rate of return on assets, and come up with a probability of success number. Ours does that too, but at the same time, it also iterates inflation and taxes as well. These two variables are responsible for much more failure than just not realizing a certain average rate of return. We also use a more realistic range of variables than other vendors. Read all about it on the product pages, directions, and the Monte Carlo page here.

We're one of the very few financial software vendors that has Monte Carlo on the college planning modules.

Read about us making professional financial plans for your clients, helping with investment portfolio management, consulting, creating custom software, or doing custom case writing work.

See samples of what you'll get by downloading the free sample comprehensive financial plan.

Why Investment Managers Keep Doing the Same Things for their Clients, Even Though It's Not Working Well

The following ancient story about the scorpion and the frog is a great analogy that describes the part of human nature that makes us all do what we do. In this case, why people continue to use the same financial software, even though it's not working.

One day a scorpion wants to get across a stream. Not being able to swim, he searches for a way over until exhausted. Then a frog comes by, on his way across the stream.

The scorpion says to the frog, "Hey, are you going across? I can't find a way over, and I'm so tired. Can I please ride on your back, as I really need to get across too!"

The frog replies, "What? Are you crazy? You're just going to sting me so I'll die and you can eat me!"

The scorpion replies, "Now why would I want to do that? Then we'd both drown in the stream."

The frog replies, "Oh yeah. I guess there's no point in stinging me if I'd die while you're on my back, and you'd die too. So okay, hop aboard!"

Mid-way across the stream, the scorpion stings the frog.

As the poison starts to paralyze him and they both start to sink, the frog says, "Why did you do that? Now we're both going to die! Stupid scorpion!!!"

The scorpion replies, "I'm a scorpion, I couldn't help it, it's my nature, that's what I do!"

The moral of the story is that most life forms just do what they do, they don't know why, and they can't change even if it's going to kill them. The more you understand the human condition, the more you know people are very much governed by this. People do what they do because it's what they do - it's as simple as that.

Stockbrokers want to sell you stocks because it's what they do. Anyone with an insurance license is going to want to sell insurance, because it's what they do. Anyone associated with a FINRA member Broker Dealer is going to want to do what that BD wants them to do. BDs want reps to only use financial plan software that they feel comfortable with, because that's what they do.

This story applies to most all financial professionals - they do what they do because of ignorance, habit, fear, lack of understanding, not knowing any better, it's what everyone else is doing. And these days - because it's what their Broker Dealer "forces" them to do (and it's way too much work, time, risk, and money to switch BDs, so people don't even consider that until things get so bad there's no choice).

Change for the better is hard, so few people change. So it's a great life lesson to figure out what people do, and then just assume that that's exactly what they're going to do in the future - even if they say they won't!

So even if financial planners do finally understand the situation, things rarely change because they either:

▪ Don't have the time to shop for new financial software,

▪ Don't have the money to buy new investment software even if they wanted to,

▪ Are only allowed to use investing software their BD approves,

▪ Are afraid to fire FINRA and their BD to become their own RIA,

▪ Are afraid to risk learning new tricks for several good reasons,

▪ When presented with the concept of using more than one mutual fund family, the first thing that goes through a financial planner's mind is how much more work it's going to be maintaining a supply of mutual fund prospecti. It's just human nature to focus on short-term pain over long-term gain, so even though it isn't really more work, they perceive it to be, so change never happens. Click here to download a system for maintaining a supply of prospecti.

▪ Some are just lazy, do things by habit, and see no need to change because it's been working.

▪ Most are over 50 and are so "old-school" and so computer illiterate that they can barely check their e-mail. So in order to get better investment performance for their clients, they'd have to hire a young computer literate person to run any new investing software. This rarely happens in the non-profitable 21st century world of flat equity markets because their income has been shrinking.

Most of these folks don't have access to the latest software, because they're so computer illiterate that they don't know to find it online. So they're limited to whatever is advertised in the back of Financial Planning Magazine, or whatever their peers/Branch Manager use, or what they BD "forces" them to use.

So investment managers keep plodding along like this because they think that's how things are supposed to be done, because that's the way things have always been done, and it's the way their Broker Dealer wants them to get things done. BDs want things done like this because they all make the most money because of the backdoor kickback deals with the large life insurance companies and large popular mutual fund families.

American Funds didn't get to be a household name with millions of shareholders because of their great performance. They got to be that way because of their financial relationships with Broker Dealers. If everyone knew how to screen mutual funds for performance in order to get the most suitable portfolios for their clients, they'd be in the middle performance quintile at best, and hardly anybody would use them. The same can be said for all of the NaviPlan and Financial Profile-like financial planning software BDs "force" their financial planners to use. It's all about large corporate "Show Me The Money" today, not getting great, suitable, low-risk investment portfolio returns for clients over the long haul. The details on the state of the investment and financial planning industry are in our money eBook.

Things are so great that Ibbotson Associates, industry icon for decades, went under in early 2006 and was bought by Morningstar. Also, Financial Profiles was doing so well that NaviPlan bought them in Sept '06. In August '07, they made their users upgrade to their new version of Profiles, which costs around $1,200 annually. People that didn't want to upgrade were deliberately abandoned because the old version stopped working, rendering all of the past work of inputting client data useless (so they lost everything with no hope of recovering any data. This could never happen using Excel, because if the program stopped working, you could still copy and paste all of the client input into the new version, or another program).

The same general investment system situation can be said for most all Broker Dealers and even the CFP/ChFC, and CFA educational programs. They go on and on ad nauseum about all of the tools and methodologies they have and teach that are used to manage money, but still leave it all up to the individual money manager to develop their own system to actually do anything useful for Real World people. This is why Broker Dealers farm out fee-based money management programs to money managers (that give the biggest kickbacks). If this is the world you live in, then you know that most have pitiful long-term investment track records, and are continually replaced.

An interesting point to note at this point is that the methodology used in both the asset allocation models and the asset allocation software on this site came directly from what the CFA program teaches (Chartered Financial Analysts professional educational program.

The vast majority of mutual fund managers are CFA Charterholders. Look in a mutual fund prospectus, and you'll see that hardly any of them will not be a CFA Charterholder).

What the CFA program teaches in a nutshell: When it comes to managing money for people, stock picking and market timing only works when one has the millions of dollars to invest in that infrastructure (employing CFA Charterholders, analysts, assistants, offices, systems and software). In other words, mutual funds. Once this battle is resolved, then they teach that the best thing to do for people in the Real World is just to use mutual funds (or ETF/Index funds) to fund asset allocations that tailor portfolios to people's lives.

We looked at the long-term investment portfolio track records from hundreds of peoples' harebrained investing ideas before taking the CFA program. Then knowing what doesn't work, we paid close attention while studying, passed all of their exams, and then implemented exactly what they taught in our asset allocation software.

The proof that this investment strategy works better than anything else humanity has ever created, is above in the table of historical returns (and the table of returns on the model portfolios page).

By the way, this is a very mature industry with hundreds of thousands of intelligent people plugging away at it daily since the 1800's. So don't hope for some new miracle investor software program to come along making investment management easy. Everything "new" will just be a heavily marketed gimmick that will produce little-to-nothing of real value once it has run its course (read the Monte Carlo explanation page to help understand the financial software industry's latest sales gimmick). Even the latest fad, the Hedge Fund, has recently petered out.

Investment software customers just want the tools and the data to do whatever harebrained money management method they want to use, because that's what they do (scorpion and frog analogy). In case you didn't know, most all professionals in this business think they have magic skills or talents, and that after getting their degrees and licenses, and reading investment management articles for 100 years, they think they can pick stocks and time the markets using some arcane strategy, and make tons of money overnight. As a result, most all have terrible historical performance, and so they waffle onto the next harebrained investment management strategy written up in the press until they figure out it doesn't work either, then on to the next, the next, and so on. All of this is why the investment industry is in the shape it's in today, and why most clients suffer with poor long-term investment performance.

Things don't have to be that way! The point is that with this turnkey money management system, you can actually manage people's money and get great returns, with low risk, and little to no FINRA/BD compliance trouble if you follow the directions. No special skills, education, industry experience, other software is required if you subscribe to the mutual fund pick updates.

Over time you'll make more money over what you've been doing because, as the late and great life insurance salesman Zig Ziegler once said, "The only way to make lots of money is by giving lots of other people what they want and need." People want and need their investment portfolios to perform the way they expect. This asset allocation software does that, and all of the others pretty much don't. The same can be said for the financial planning software on this site too.

Read more about our Mission Statement, target markets, history of the site, software, the developer, and the financial planning software business in general

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