Quicken and VeriPlan Comparison Optimizing Your Tax-Advantaged Retirement Plans over Your Lifecycle
In this series of short articles, The Skilled Investor compares the functionality of the Quicken and VeriPlan financial lifecycle planners. At the bottom of this article you will find links to the previous topic and the next topic. A link is also provided that returns you to the main topic listing of this comparison.*
VeriPlan Retirement Contribution Strategy Planner
Regarding traditional tax-deferred IRA accounts and Roth 'never-taxed' IRA accounts, VeriPlan has fully automated the lifecycle projection of your IRA contributions, deductions, asset growth, withdrawals, and taxation. When necessary, it automatically assesses federal early withdrawal penalties.
Your settings on VeriPlan's Tax-advantaged Plan Tool control your projected tax-advantaged plan contributions that are funded from your future positive net income and/or from your future taxable financial assets, up to current legal annual contribution limits. This tool allows you to determine the portion of your projected annual contributions that would be deposited automatically into either traditional 'tax-deferred' accounts or Roth 'never-taxed' accounts. (See: VeriPlan helps you to decide what your lifetime tax-advantaged and tax-deferred investment strategy should be)
* VeriPlan's Total Contribution Limitation Tool allows you to set your personal limitation on overall tax-advantaged account deposits, as a percent of your future annual positive net cash flows.
* VeriPlan's Roth Contribution Limitation Tool allows you to set the percentage that Roth 'never-taxed' contributions would be of your total annual contributions into both traditional 'tax-deferred' and Roth 'never-taxed' accounts.
See also: Traditional versus Roth tax-advantaged plan contributions, Factors that tend to favor Roth tax-advantaged plan contributions (Part 1 of 2), and (Part 2 of 2).
Quicken Retirement Planner
The Quicken Retirement Planner's projections will differentiate between your total taxable assets and total tax-deferred assets, and it will assess federal early withdrawal penalties. Strangely, however, the Quicken Retirement Planner does not differentiate between traditional and Roth account withdrawals in retirement. Therefore, Quicken cannot help you to optimize your lifetime retirement tax planning.
The Quicken Retirement Planner does not to provide any automated means for you to analyze whether making traditional or Roth contributions now would be more advantageous to you across your lifetime financial plan. Furthermore, the Quicken Retirement Planner does not provide a means to limit your future tax-advantaged contributions to a fraction of your positive annual net income in future years, as VeriPlan does.
<< Previous Topic* Lawrence Russell and Company is the publisher of The Skilled Investor and the developer of VeriPlan. The Skilled Investor has made an attempt to characterize factually the functionality of both the Quicken Retirement Planner and VeriPlan.