Where can I find the retirement planning tool in Quicken?

Mark Sam

Quicken advertises retirement planning tools and allegedly has one called "lifetime planner." But searching high and low through the Quicken for Mac subscription application, I can not find it. Can someone play tell me where, in the Mac Application it is located.

Mark Sam

Rick - Thanks for the prompt response. Any idea if/when the "lifetime planner" retirement planning tool will make its way to Quicken for Mac?

jacobs

@Mark Sam There is a long-running Idea thread requesting this feature be built for Quicken Mac. You can view it here, and I suggest you add your vote for it (click the little dark gray arrow under the vote counter in the yellow box). As RickO said, we have no indication whether this is on the roadmap for future development or not. The topic has 187 votes (counter plus "legacy" votes from when this site was on a different software platform), which is a quite high total for this site. The status shows "Under Consideration", which means it has been sent to the development and product teams, but they have not yet committed to adding this feature — so we don't know if, let alone when, this functionality will come to Quicken Mac. 

I should note that there are some significant problems with the Windows implementation of the retirement planner because while the feature exists, it hasn't been updated to keep pace with changes in tax laws. As one Windows user laments in that thread:

Right now, the Lifetime Planner in Quicken Windows still uses RMD's under the old law of 70 1/2 instead of the newer 72. Roth IRA's aren't really taken into withdrawal consideration. And I still can't tell Quicken which accounts should have money withdrawn first and in which order.   So, what I used to think was a pretty cool feature in Quicken Windows has now become a worthless inaccurate feature that, now that I'm retired, I can no longer rely on... So sure, Quicken Windows has the Lifetime Planner...but is it accurate and useable? If not, it's no better than not having it at all.

So it's not a simple matter of building a Mac feature that mimics the Quicken Windows feature; it needs to be built from the ground up to be up-to-date with current and future changes to retirement tax laws. And perhaps that's one reason Quicken management hasn't rushed to add this feature; they likely don't want it to be like TurboTax, requiring changes almost every tax year as laws are amended.