Don't use Evernest if you want someone else to manage your money.
Evernest is a planning tool. It shows you what happens to your money over time. It doesn't invest it, move it, or touch it in any way. There's no portfolio management, no rebalancing, no trade execution.
If you want someone to handle everything — pick your investments, rebalance quarterly, make the decisions for you — you want an advisor or a robo-advisor like Betterment or Wealthfront. They charge 0.25-1% of your portfolio annually for that service. On $500K, that's $1,250-$5,000/year.
We don't think that's a bad deal if you genuinely don't want to think about it. We just don't do that.
Don't use Evernest if you need tax optimization.
Evernest isn't a tax tool. It lets you view your spending pre-tax or post-tax using a tax rate you enter, but it doesn't calculate taxes: no brackets, no state tax, no optimization. It does not model Roth conversion ladders, tax-loss harvesting, capital gains strategies, or multi-entity business tax planning.
If you have a complex tax situation — multiple business entities, significant real estate depreciation schedules, stock option strategies — you need either a CPA who specializes in retirement planning or a tool like Boldin that has 250+ input fields.
We made a deliberate choice here. Most people don't need tax-lot-level modeling to answer the question “will my money last?” But some do, and if that's you, Evernest will leave you wanting more.
Don't use Evernest if you want your accounts to sync automatically.
Evernest will never ask for your brokerage login. We don't connect to Plaid. We don't pull your balances. You enter your portfolio total and select your portfolio type — that's it.
This is a feature, not a limitation. Your credentials never leave your browser. There's no third-party data aggregator sitting between you and your money. But it does mean you update your balances yourself.
If automatic account syncing is important to you, Empower does it for free (with their advisory upsell), and Boldin does it for about three times Evernest's price. Both use Plaid, which means giving a third party read access to your financial accounts. That tradeoff is yours to make.
Don't use Evernest if you want AI to tell you what to do.
There is no AI in Evernest. No chatbot analyzing your finances. No algorithm making recommendations. No machine learning model training on your data.
You enter your numbers. The math engine projects them forward. You read the chart and make your own decisions. That's it.
If you want AI-powered advice, Boldin has an AI assistant baked into its planning tool. We think the retirement planning decision is too important to delegate to a language model, but if you disagree, that option exists.
Don't use Evernest if you want to model individual stock holdings.
Evernest doesn't project your individual investments. It projects your money — invested in various types of portfolios — and how that money performs long-term based on historical data for each portfolio type.
You tell us your portfolio total and whether it's traditional, fixed income, or income investing. We simulate thousands of market scenarios based on that type. You never enter a ticker symbol.
If you want to project specific holdings — “what if my AAPL position grows at X% and I sell half in 2030” — ProjectionLab or a spreadsheet will serve you better. We believe most retirees don't need that level of detail to make the right decision, but some do.
Evernest is for people who want to see the answer themselves.
If you got this far and thought “none of those apply to me” — you might be exactly who I built this for.
You want to know if your money will last — and see the year-by-year math, not a single number.
You don't want to link your financial accounts to anything. Your credentials stay with you.
You'd rather spend 5 minutes setting up a plan than 5 hours learning a spreadsheet.
You want to test "what if" scenarios — different retirement ages, spending levels, Social Security timing — and see how each one changes the picture.
You trust yourself to make your own decisions when you can see the data clearly.
You don't think you should pay $1,250–$5,000/year for someone to tell you what a chart can show you for $48.
You don't want AI anywhere near your financial planning.
You want to run 50,000 Monte Carlo scenarios to stress-test your plan against bad markets — not just hope for the best.
What it costs
Full projection engine. Year-by-year cash flow. Data saved. Simple scenarios free forever.
No credit card. No trial. No expiration.
50,000 Monte Carlo scenarios. Multiple portfolios. Multiple scenarios. Spend tapering. Advanced features.
$47.88/year. Cancel anytime.
Who built this
Built by a retired engineer who plans his own retirement. I'm a software engineer turned income investor, and I got tired of the two options available: free calculators that give you a single number and tell you nothing, or $150+/year software with 250 input fields that takes a weekend to set up.
There's no venture capital. No advisory sales team waiting to call you. No AI training on your data. The business model is simple: a free tier that works, and a paid plan for people who want more. That's it.
Still here?
If none of the reasons above scared you off, the free tier takes about 5 minutes to set up. No credit card. No sales pitch.