About.

RetPlan provides a view into your retirement. It attempts to find a tax-efficient solution for your spending needs, based on your current assets, expected income, pension entitlements and your projections for inflation and interest rates.

RetPlan is aimed at individuals in their 50s and 60s. The model has a 35-year span, which would take a 55-year-old to age 90, still a reasonable target for what we call the 'expiry date'.

Please be sure to read the details on assumptions and simplifications behind the model and assurances on the safety and security of any data you may enter here.

What's in the pipeline

Here is a list of some of the items we are working on, in no particular order. Please send us your suggestions and tell us your priorities on the contact page.

• Add to and refine suggestions to improve scenario results. RetPlan is capable of detecting more specific situations and suggesting strategies to lower tax liabilities.
• Improve handling of real estate. Real estate is a significant asset for many Canadians and can be a major source of funds in retirement. RetPlan supports buying, selling and borrowing against houses, condos and cottages but, for example, currently makes no provision for capital gains tax on property that is not your principal residence. Transaction costs are also not addressed.
• Add survivor benefits. The Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security have notoriously meagre benefits for the survivor when a spouse passes away but RetPlan currently does not not consider these benefits at all. Other pensions may be more generous and could have a notable effect.
• Estimate tax implications for the estate. Currently, in a 2-person household, RetPlan assumes the survivor receives the full value of all assets when the first taxpayer 'expires'. When the last member of a household expires RetPlan simply displays the individual's net worth. Although Canada does not have an inheritance tax there can be significant income tax and capital gains liabilities on the final assets. It would be helpful to see the effect of various strategies such as gifting rather than bequeathing to beneficiaries.
• Update the reverse mortgage loan rules. The number of firms offering reverse mortgages has grown in the past three years and there is more flexibility in reverse mortgage eligibility than is currently modelled here.
• Include other asset and loan types. You may own a wide variety of assets that are not valued and taxed like real estate or banking/investment accounts: private companies, trusts, off-shore investments, farmland. You may also have a loans that are not tied to real estate such as car loans and credit card balances.
• Itemize non-registered assets, so you can enter individual balances from any number of banking and investment accounts.
• Add the ability to buy annuities. In the current low-interest environment annuities have fallen out of favour but the relatively new or recently updated Advanced Life Deferred Annuity, or ALDA, and Variable Payment Life Annuity, or VPLA, are said to offer "income for life options in a cost-effective manner".
• Maintain history. It would be helpful to track the progress of your financial situation over the years and compare actual results with the plan. This in turn could feed into a revised plan or a new scenario based on the then-current reality.
• Display inner tables and forecasts. The model will become more transparent by showing you the RRIF minimum withdrawal percentages, reverse mortgage eligibility, TFSA deposit maximums, federal and provincial tax ranges and other actual and predicted numbers that are used to calculate scenario outcomes.
• Add the ability to share your scenario with another registered user, with or without the ability to make changes. This would allow you to give access to the plan to your spouse, or for a financial planner to create as scenario on your behalf.

About us

Me, actually. After some 25 years in IT and operations in the financial services sector, a late-career employment interlude raised the question: what if this is it? What if I do not land another position? Would I be able to get through the next 30 years in relative comfort or will I be eating cat food in those senior years?

Nearly all banks and wealth managers have some online tool to provide some degree of retirement planning. One might tell you, for example, how much wealth you need to accumulate before retiring. All produce some graphic output, generally reassuring messages and inevitably a recommendation to contact the company for more information. I wanted to know details, the assumptions underlying their models, the ability to do what-if analysis and to see the effect of choosing alternatives like downsizing sooner or later.

RetPlan began as a spreadsheet. As the model grew in complexity I added some program code behind the spreadsheet. Soon the number of inputs and the variety of outputs demanded a much more flexible user interface so the web application was born.

Mssing Link Business Services is an unincorporated business operating in Ontario. It is not affiliated with any financial services firm.

For more information please leave a message through the Contact tab.