Introducing ActuaPlan v1.0 - A Smarter Way to Plan for Retirement

October 1, 2025

Retirement planning needs more than simple averages. It requires accounting for market ups and downs, how long you might live, and other life's surprises. As an actuary, I built ActuaPlan to address these realities. ActuaPlan is a web-based retirement planning platform that runs thousands of scenario simulations (instead of just one static forecast) to help you prepare your future with confidence. It's designed to be professional yet approachable, so that anyone can use this tool to make more informed retirement decisions.

Why I built ActuaPlan

Traditional retirement calculators often oversimplify the problem by assuming everything will follow near averages. In reality, markets fluctuate, people living longer than they expect, and unexpected bills come. I felt that the existing online tools did not live up to my expectation on how they dealt with this problem. I wanted to create something more realistic and empowering, guided by three core principles of sound retirement planning:

1. Volatility matters: Your retirement outcome depends not just on average returns, but on when good and bad years occur. Big losses early in retirement can derail a plan even if long-term averages look fine. To address this, ActuaPlan runs over 10,000 retirement scenarios for each plan. Instead of giving you one number, it shows you the percentage of success (i.e. probability of you outliving your money).
2. Longevity Optimization: More often people use point estimate like 95 years to plan their financial retirement. ActuaPlan treats both outliving your money (by underestimating lifespan) and underspending (by being overly frugal due to fear) as risks. To do that we use longevity models drawing on actuarial life tables to simulate life expectancy projections. This helps you find a balanced plan - one that lets you enjoy life today while still ensuring you won't run out of money if you live longer than expected.
3. Resilience and Stress Testing: Life can throw curveballs - a market crash, a health crisis, high inflation etc. A solid plan should be resilient to these life events. ActuaPlan is building out rigorous stress test scenarios that intentionally simulate these "what-if" events. By testing your plan against worst-case scenarios (like deep recessions or unexpected expenses), the tool highlights potential vulnerabilities and helps you rethink your strategy. (This feature is in the works.)

These principles ensure ActuaPlan isn't just another calculator. The goal isn't to provide a falsely reassuring single number, but to offer actionable insight derived from robust analysis.

What ActuaPlan offers today

I'm excited to announce that ActuaPlan's core features are now live and ready for you to use:

• Comprehensive Planning Inputs: ActuaPlan lets you incorporate all the key pieces of your retirement picture. You can add multiple income sources (salary, rentals, pensions, etc.) define your expected retirement spending and one-off goals (like a home purchase or travel plans), and even account for taxes and healthcare costs. The planner covers everything from investment allocations to long-term care assumptions, giving you a truly holistic view of your financial plan. All these inputs feed into our proprietary actuarial engine to generate personalized projections.
• Powerful Simulation Engine: Every time you update your plan, you can run a Monte Carlo simulation with a single click. The engine will simulate up to 10,000 retirement scenarios for you, modeling year-by-year market returns and inflation variations. The results are displayed through intuitive charts – for example, you can see your median outcome versus pessimistic outcomes, a Monte Carlo cone of your portfolio balance over time, and other visuals that make the data easy to understand. This scenario-based approach helps you see how likely you are to meet your goals under various market conditions, rather than giving a false sense of certainty.
• Personalized Longevity Planning: ActuaPlan currently uses a single-life longevity table (based on broad actuarial data) to estimate how long your retirement might need to last. In practice, this means the simulations account for the probability of living to various ages, so you can gauge how long your money might need to stretch. (A joint-life option for couples is coming soon, as noted below.) By modeling longevity properly, the tool encourages you to plan for a range of life spans – so you neither underestimate nor overestimate your needs.
• Interactive and Immediate Feedback: The platform is interactive – adjust an assumption and you can re-run the simulation instantly to see the impact. You can save your plan (the free version allows one saved scenario) and come back to it anytime. This makes it easy to try out different strategies (e.g. retiring a couple of years later, or saving a bit more each year) and directly observe how those changes affect your retirement outlook. ActuaPlan also includes a few smart assistive features, like an optimizer for Social Security claiming age on Pro accounts (to suggest when it might be best to start taking benefits based on your plan’s data). The aim is to not only crunch numbers but also to guide you toward better decisions.

In summary, the first version of ActuaPlan provides a robust toolkit for retirement planning. It reflects professional-grade techniques (the kind financial planners and actuaries use) packaged in a way that everyone can use from their browser. All you need is an interest in taking charge of your retirement – no spreadsheets or advanced finance knowledge required.

Free Plan vs. Pro Plan – Keeping Things Accessible

One of my core beliefs is that effective retirement planning should be accessible to as many people as possible. That’s why ActuaPlan offers a generous Free plan alongside a Pro subscription:

• Free Plan: The free version of ActuaPlan includes all the essential features you need to build and analyze a solid retirement plan. You can run up to 10,000 Monte Carlo simulation paths per analysis, save one plan scenario, set up 1 goal and a few income streams (up to 3), and use the standard investment options (pre-built equity/bond/cash allocations). The free tier even works without a login (anonymously) for basic use, so you can jump in and start experimenting immediately. My hope is that anyone, regardless of their budget, can use these tools to gain insight into their retirement preparedness.
• Pro Plan: The Pro subscription is designed for power users and to support the project’s sustainability. It includes everything in Free, plus higher limits and advanced capabilities. Pro users can run 100,000 simulation paths for extra precision, save multiple plans and set many more goals or income streams (useful if you want to compare scenarios or have complex finances). Pro also unlocks premium features like advanced long-term care simulation, custom investment asset classes, and additional market models (e.g. normal and fat-tailed return simulations). It also unlocks upcoming features such as joint-life planning for couples as detailed below. In addition, Pro comes with priority support if you need help. We’ve priced Pro modestly (with an option for a free trial) and view it primarily as a way to cover the costs of cloud servers, data sources, and ongoing research needed to keep ActuaPlan running and improving. In short, the free plan is our way of giving back, and the Pro plan is how a few can help sustain the service for all.

I want to emphasize that the free version is not a limited-time demo or a teaser, but a fully functional tool for its intended scope. If you’re an individual with a straightforward planning need, the free tier can genuinely help you prepare for retirement at no cost. Those who choose Pro enable me to keep improving ActuaPlan (and they get some extra bells and whistles as thanks). This balance lets the project welcome everyone while remaining financially viable and up-to-date.

Vision and What’s Coming Next

Launching ActuaPlan is just the beginning. There are several exciting enhancements and features in the pipeline, guided by user feedback and the same principles mentioned earlier:

• Couples (Joint-Life) Planning: A high priority on our roadmap is support for joint longevity modeling and planning for couples. Soon, Pro users will be able to simulate plans for two people together – factoring in dual life expectancies, coordinating Social Security claims for spouses, and handling scenarios like a surviving spouse’s needs. This will make ActuaPlan more useful for married couples or anyone planning together with a partner.
• Roth Conversion Optimization: By the end of 2025, we aim to introduce a Roth conversion optimizer for Pro accounts. This tool will analyze your projected income and tax brackets over time to suggest if and when it might be beneficial to convert traditional retirement funds to Roth. The goal is to help users minimize lifetime taxes and maximize after-tax retirement income through smart tax strategy.
• Advanced Simulations & Asset Customization: We are working on adding more market simulation models beyond the current historical bootstrap. Pro users can already use options like normal and fat-tailed (e.g. Student-t) distributions for returns, but we are also building copula and correlation matrix models to more accurately simulate the downside risks of the market (currently, these market models except historical bootstrap assumes that the returns for each asset classes are independent). These will let savvy users stress test their plans under different statistical assumptions. Additionally, the ability to define custom asset classes allows Pro users to simulate different asset classes such as cryptocurrencies, gold and other special assets.
• Resilience Testing Scenarios: As noted, a key vision is to fully integrate stress tests into the planning process. Expect features that let you simulate specific what-if events, such as dot-com bust, long-term depression, or unexpected medical cost. This will complement the Monte Carlo runs by explicitly demonstrating how your plan holds up in various tough situations. My aim is for users to not only see median cases, but also understand worst-case scenarios and plan contingencies accordingly.
• Continuous Improvements: Beyond major features, I’ll be continuously refining ActuaPlan’s accuracy and usability. This includes keeping the underlying actuarial assumptions up-to-date with the latest research, improving the user interface based on your feedback, and expanding guidance within the app. For example, more on-screen tips, educational content, and maybe community features (like sharing anonymized scenarios or a knowledge base) are ideas on the table. I view ActuaPlan as an evolving platform – one that will grow with its users. If something doesn’t work well or feels missing, I’m happy to listen and ready to improve it.

Models are simplified representation of the reality. No model can truly predict the future. As I develop this retirement planning tool, I'm constantly humbled and reminded of the complexity of retirement planning. What we can do is to keep making the planning process more realistic, transparent, and user-friendly. My vision is to consider ActuaPlan a collaborative effort with its community: I bring my actuarial expertise and coding work; you bring your real-life questions and feedback. Together, we’ll keep refining this tool so that it truly helps people make better retirement decisions.

Closing Thoughts

I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported and inspired this project so far. Building ActuaPlan has been a labor of love rooted in my desire to make high-quality retirement planning available to everyone. As an actuary, I’ve always felt a responsibility to bridge the gap between complex financial theory and practical, everyday planning. With ActuaPlan, I hope I’ve taken a step in that direction.

ActuaPlan is now live on actuaplan.com, and I invite you to give it a try. Start with the free plan, explore the scenarios, and see what insights you uncover about your retirement journey. If you find value in it, or if you have ideas to make it better, I’d love to hear from you. This launch is just the start of ActuaPlan’s story. My commitment is to keep working hard (and humbly) to make retirement planning less daunting and more empowering for you. Thank you for reading, and happy planning!