Investments: Future is currently available to all PlannerPlus members. You can find it in the left menu.

Most retirement forecasts assume your investments earn the same return every year, for the rest of your life. Real portfolios don't work that way, and the years right around retirement are when that assumption matters most. Investments: Future shows you how much investment risk suits you, and what your plan looks like when your forecast shifts with your stage of life. Start by taking our Risk Tolerance Survey, to identify the level of risk that aligns with your time horizon, how you react to risk, your income needs, and your investing experience.

Once you've taken the survey, you can compare two ways to forecast your plan:

Seeing the two side by side helps you understand the assumptions behind your plan and what a life-stage-aware approach could change, without changing anything in your plan.

Every Allocation Path strategy is built from the same six asset classes. What changes is how much of each it holds:

Each strategy matches one of the five risk profiles from the survey. The descriptions below capture each profile's overall character. Under Allocation Path, every strategy holds more equity early and shifts toward fixed income and cash as you approach retirement. Your allocation chart shows the exact mix at each life stage.

Aggressive Almost entirely in equities with only a small fixed income cushion — designed for investors with a long time horizon and high tolerance for year-to-year swings.

Moderately Aggressive Equity-heavy with a meaningful fixed income allocation to soften the roughest swings — built for growth-oriented investors who still want some ballast.

Moderate A balanced split between equities and fixed income — Boldin's default allocation, designed to balance long-term growth with meaningful downside protection.

Moderately Conservative More fixed income than equities, providing ballast against volatility while still allowing your portfolio to participate in market growth.

Conservative Heavily weighted toward fixed income, with a smaller equity position to provide modest growth.

Every strategy adjusts based on where you are relative to your planned retirement date, not your age. There are five life stages:

An early retiree moves through these stages earlier, and a late retiree moves through them later. As your plan crosses from one stage to the next, the modeled allocation shifts gradually rather than jumping overnight.

Why the Retirement Risk Zone matters. The years around your retirement date carry the most risk. A downturn then does more damage than one earlier or later, because you're starting to draw from your accounts instead of adding to them. This is where Allocation Path works hardest, shifting most decisively toward fixed income and cash to help protect what you've built when protection matters most.

Does Allocation Path change my plan? No. For now, Allocation Path is comparison-only. Your accounts, rate assumptions, and projections are untouched. Applying an Allocation Path model to your plan is coming soon, and when it arrives, it will always be your choice.

Does Boldin move or manage my money? Never. Allocation Path is a modeling tool. Your actual accounts at your bank or brokerage are always untouched.

Why do Allocation Path's projections differ from my forecast? Your plan uses the rates of return you've set on each account. Allocation Path instead models an allocation strategy: one professionally constructed mix across six asset classes, whose return and risk adjust by life stage. If your own assumptions are more optimistic than the strategy's expected returns, Allocation Path's projected balances can come in lower. That doesn't mean the strategy is worse. It means the comparison uses researched, forward-looking return estimates rather than an entered assumption. The exact rates, and how they compare to Historical Rates, are in the technical article linked below.

Which outcomes does Allocation Path compare? It runs on average expected returns for each model portfolio. It doesn't include optimistic or pessimistic variants in this release.

Does the Risk Tolerance Survey decide my strategy? No. It points to a risk profile as a starting point. You choose what to explore.

What's coming next? The headline is Apply to Plan: the ability to set an Allocation Path model as your plan's investment assumption, replacing per-account rates of return. We're also planning the ability to exclude specific accounts from an allocation model.

Is this investment advice? No. Allocation Path shows you the consequences of investing a given way; it doesn't tell you how to invest. It's an educational modeling tool, and any decisions about your actual investments are yours to make.

View Investments: Future — A Deeper Look to see the allocations, rates, and methodology behind each strategy.

Questions we didn't answer here? Ask Boldin AI in the planner, or reach out to support — we're happy to go deeper.