Pralana Gold

What it is

Pralana Gold is the Excel edition of the Pralana Retirement Calculator, a macro-driven workbook that models a US household year by year from now to the end of its life expectancy. Stuart Matthews, a retired defence-industry engineer, began it in January 2011; the vendor is Pralana Consulting LLC. It is bought by do-it-yourself planners who want to see and check every line of a tax-aware projection rather than accept a score.

Income streams — employment with self-employment and QBI flags, pensions, annuities, Social Security, windfalls — and expense streams — property with cost basis and loans, children and college, healthcare, charitable giving including QCDs — are each modelled with their own rules. Accounts are cash, taxable, tax-deferred and tax-free, plus HSAs, 529 plans and inherited traditional and Roth IRAs, with RMDs to SECURE 2.0. Federal, state, FICA and NIIT taxes are calculated, as are Medicare Part B and Part D IRMAA surcharges and ACA subsidies from MAGI and the second-lowest-cost silver plan premium.

Portfolio returns come from user-defined asset classes. You set either asset location directly, or a portfolio-wide allocation plus a preference for which account holds what, and the model tries to keep the allocation through conversions and market swings, with location as the secondary goal.

Analysis runs three ways. A deterministic projection compares alternatives on fixed assumptions. A Monte Carlo runs 1,000 traditional or bootstrap simulations and reports distribution bands, success rate and mean final savings. A historical analysis replays the plan from each start year since 1928 — more than 75 sequences — showing the best and worst start years, and can project one chosen historical start year in full.

On top sit the optimisers: Social Security start ages for both spouses judged by final effective savings — the vendor's phrase is "maximum lifetime savings" — rather than lifetime benefits, withdrawal order across pre-, early and late retirement, Roth conversions capped by tax bracket, capital-gains bracket, IRMAA tier or ACA poverty-line multiple, with an optimised mode that picks the bracket limits "to maximize your long-term savings balance", and an earliest retirement date at 90% Monte Carlo confidence. Non-essential spending can be handed to a variable strategy — fixed percentage, floor and ceiling, Guyton-Klinger, CAPE rules, an actuarial method. The consumption-smoothing option reports the additional annual spending the plan can support; run deterministically that figure has roughly a 50% chance of success, so the model can instead combine smoothing with Monte Carlo and historical runs and give the spending level at 90% probability.

Pricing

Gold is a $99-a-year subscription with a $30 sign-up fee, so $129 in the first year, paid through Stripe. The terms of service state that fees are non-refundable unless the vendor agrees case by case. The subscription buys updates; the purchase page says use of the tool is indefinite. The terms still describe Gold as a one-time-fee product, a leftover from when each year's version was bought outright.

Pralana Bronze, a simpler free Excel model, is still downloadable, but the vendor says it will be discontinued and replaced by a free trial of Pralana Online. Gold has no trial of its own.

Data & coverage

US households only: federal and state income tax, Social Security, Medicare and the ACA are the model's spine. Historical returns and inflation run from 1928; everything else is your own assumption — returns and standard deviations per asset class, inflation, life expectancy. No market data and no security-level holdings.

Integrations

None outward. The workbook prints PDF reports, imports its own data from the prior year's version, and can be imported into Pralana Online at a discount for Gold subscribers. There is no account linking, no API and no add-in: it is a file you open in Excel.

Limitations

• Needs Microsoft Excel on Windows or Mac. Not Numbers, Sheets or LibreOffice.
• US-only.
• Excel's quirks are the product's quirks. The change log records iterative-calculation settings that gave inconsistent results and were disabled during withdrawal-order optimisation, and printable-report run-time errors on some systems. PRC2026.2 (4 June 2026) also corrected consumption smoothing, which gave erroneous results with iterative calculation enabled — check the version before trusting an older smoothing result.
• Steep input burden. The detail that makes it checkable is also hours of data entry, and the user manual runs as a separate document.
• No refunds by default under the terms.
• No account linking. Balances are typed in and go stale until you update them.

Alternatives

Pralana Online is the same vendor's web version, at the same price, for anyone who would rather not run Excel. Boldin and ProjectionLab are browser planners with account linking and less tax depth. MaxiFi Planner starts from consumption smoothing rather than adding it as an option. For free historical-sequence testing without taxes, FI Calc and cFIREsim.