WealthTrace

What it is

WealthTrace is a browser-based retirement planner sold both to individuals and to financial advisors. It projects a household year by year from current account balances, contributions, Social Security, pensions, annuities and cash inflows such as a home sale, against retirement living expenses and one-off goals, and reports the age of the first shortfall and its average size in today's dollars alongside the usual probability figure.

The deterministic projection uses the returns and inflation you enter, which can be vectored — written as a schedule such as 3%|2029 then 5%, so a rate can change over time. Returns can step down linearly towards retirement to imitate a shift to a more conservative portfolio. Taxable accounts track cost basis and split returns into dividends and interest, because each is taxed differently; RMDs are applied, Medicare premiums follow income and the IRMAA thresholds, and Social Security can be estimated with the SSA's own algorithm when you do not enter a statement figure.

The Monte Carlo runs 1,000 simulations around your expected total return and reports the probability of funding every goal plus the worst-quartile and best-quartile outcomes. The February 2026 release added guardrails, which adjust retirement living expenses when the portfolio moves past a threshold, and the March release charts how often they fire and in which years. Deluxe adds bear-market tests, which run the plan through historical recessions, and a Roth conversion optimiser, added in December 2025, that searches conversion timing and amounts against federal and state brackets, the taxation of benefits, capital gains and IRMAA.

What sets it apart from most consumer planners is the account aggregation: linked accounts refresh holdings and balances daily, a third-party classifier maps every fund and ETF to asset classes, and Deluxe shows performance history, fees and turnover per holding. The Trace AI assistant, added in July 2026 to Deluxe and Advisor, answers questions about the plan from its own data and can try assumption changes without saving them.

Development is active: the public release notes run from version 2025.1 in July 2025 to 2026.3.4 on 24 September 2026.

Pricing

Individuals pay $229 a year for Standard or $289 for Deluxe; the free trial needs no card and its length is not published. The split is analytical depth: Standard stops at the Monte Carlo, scenarios and account linking, and everything historical, Roth or AI is Deluxe. Saving more than one separate individual plan costs extra, and so does one-on-one help from the vendor's staff.

The Advisor plan is $1,049 a year or $315 a quarter and adds a client portal, an online fact finder, model portfolios, report templates with the firm's own logo and phone support.

Data & coverage

Built for US households. The FAQ says it can be used elsewhere by overriding the tax settings, but Social Security, Medicare, IRMAA and RMD logic are American. Market data enters only through linked accounts and the vendor's historical data on those holdings; plan returns are your assumptions.

State tax is the one fact the vendor's own pages disagree on: the FAQ asks for an average state rate because the program makes no estimate, while release notes since December 2025 describe state brackets and state pension-income rules.

Integrations

Account aggregation runs through Yodlee, with Plaid as a fallback since December 2025; Plaid connections carry no balance or transaction history. The plan exports as a PDF report — the vendor publishes sample reports from simple to comprehensive. There is no consumer API, no spreadsheet export of the projection on the feature list, and no MCP server.

Limitations

• No permanent free tier, and the trial length is unpublished.
• The Monte Carlo is parametric. Returns are drawn around your own expected mean, not replayed from history; the historical stress tests are separate and Deluxe-only.
• Contributions are a single number per account with a start and end age; the FAQ says varying them year by year is not allowed, and a dip in saving has to be entered as an expense.
• Pre-retirement spending is assumed to be covered by income, so the model only tracks what is saved before retirement unless you enter an explicit expense.
• The vendor's documentation lags the product, most visibly on state tax.
• No Social Security claiming optimiser on the feature list — claiming ages are what-if scenarios you set, not a search.

Alternatives

Boldin is the closest consumer equivalent, also with linked balances, at a lower price. ProjectionLab adds historical backtesting to its base tier. Pralana Gold goes further on tax and optimisation without account linking, and MaxiFi Planner solves for a spending level instead of a success rate.