Free personal financial planning software: 5 top platforms

Years of tagged transactions, category budgets, and the Sunday-night net-worth ritual that had become part of the household's rhythm are gone with it. They are not asking about Monte Carlo simulations or Roth conversion ladders. They are asking you, their advisor, what to use this week.

We have lived this conversation, and the honest answer is that nothing single-handedly replaced Mint. That is not a failure of the wealthtech stack — it is a rebalancing of it. The landscape of free personal financial planning software has fractured along functional lines: aggregation and fee analysis on one end, retirement cash-flow modeling in the middle, quantitative backtesting at the other. The client-alignment work is matching the tool to their actual planning depth, not their aspirational one.

Empower Personal Dashboard: Automated Aggregation and Fee Analysis

For the client whose primary pain is fragmentation — a 401(k) here, a brokerage there, an old IRA, a spouse's cash sweep, plus a couple of bank accounts they forgot to mention — the first tool on the table is Empower Personal Dashboard. What Personal Capital was before Empower absorbed the brand in 2020, the dashboard remains: account aggregation across institutions, net worth tracking, and the fee analyzer that quietly surfaces what clients are actually paying in embedded fund expense ratios and advisory charges.

Empower's fee analyzer is the part of the dashboard most clients underestimate. It pulls expense ratios out of every fund holding, surfaces any trailing 12b-1 fees hiding in legacy mutual funds, and lays the all-in cost of ownership next to the household's expected return. We have seen more than one client reconsider a long-held brokerage relationship after watching that number animate on screen. The retirement planning module runs Monte Carlo simulations against the consolidated balance sheet, which lets us move the conversation away from "how much do I have" and toward "what is the probability my spending plan survives a 30-year horizon." That framing matters because it converts the dashboard from a vanity metric into a fiduciary reality check.

The paid tier is not where most clients need to land. Empower's wealth management service activates at a $100,000 investable-asset floor, with AUM fees between 0.49% and 0.89%. For clients under that threshold, the dashboard is the product. We treat it as the diagnostic layer of the relationship, not the management layer — a free wealth management tool that earns its keep by telling the household what it does not yet know about its own money.

Free software does the heavy lifting on data. Our value as advisors sits in the judgment layered on top of it.

Boldin and ProjectionLab: Privacy-First Retirement and Cash Flow Modeling

Some clients are past the aggregation conversation. They have one or two accounts, they know where they are, and what they want is a long-horizon model that survives their assumptions being wrong. Two platforms serve that lane well, and they get paired often enough in our client conversations that they belong in the same frame.

Boldin

NewRetirement, now rebranding as Boldin through 2025 and 2026 alongside the rollout of its Boldin AI assist, sits in the long-range retirement modeling lane. Its free Basic plan handles retirement income and cash-flow modeling — drawdown sequencing, Social Security claiming strategies, the structural mechanics of a 25- to 40-year retirement, the kind of generational horizon a budgeting app was never built to address. More than 450,000 users are managing over $300 billion in assets on the platform, which tells you the audience.

The paid upgrade is where the analytical horsepower lives. PlannerPlus runs $144 per year — $12 per month — and unlocks Monte Carlo simulations and Roth conversion modeling. That is the difference between a single-point projection and a distribution of outcomes. For a client sitting on a meaningful tax-deferred balance, that tier is the actual planning conversation; the free version is the scratchpad.

ProjectionLab

ProjectionLab runs parallel to Boldin but with a different philosophy. The free Basic plan offers up to 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations and historical backtesting against more than 150 years of market data, all without requiring users to link bank accounts. For clients in the FIRE community, or for any client whose first instinct on hearing "aggregator" is to ask about credential security, that privacy posture is the product itself. The historical depth matters more than it first sounds: 150 years of market data covers the 1929 crash, the 1970s stagflation regime, the 1987 liquidity event, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 pandemic drawdown — a sequence of structurally different shocks that no shorter backtest can replicate.

The binding constraint on the free tier is workflow. Saving plans — the ability to persist and compare modeled scenarios across sessions — requires the Premium tier at $129 per year, with Lifetime access at $1,199. That pricing signals where the platform sits on the spectrum between consumer tool and practitioner-grade modeler.

The trade-off is real and we name it out loud. Both platforms are excellent at scenario work and weaker at the daily cash-truth that Mint users miss. We tell clients to think of these as the planning workbench, not the household ledger.

Fidelity Full View: Institutional-Grade Integration for Retail Investors

There is a class of client for whom the right answer is the one already inside their brokerage. Fidelity Full View is free to Fidelity account holders, runs on eMoney Advisor's institutional planning engine, and lets clients link external accounts to build a consolidated balance sheet inside a Fidelity-native experience. The Guided Portfolio Summary walks through asset allocation, concentration risk, and the gap between current savings trajectory and the stated retirement goal. Data flows into Fidelity's My Plan retirement tool, which extends the same picture out across decades.

The trade-off is a soft lock-in we have learned to name out loud. A consolidated view built inside Fidelity's ecosystem is convenient, but it can subtly anchor the client to Fidelity's product shelf — fund selection, advisor referrals, proprietary planning frameworks. That is not a problem for every client, and it is not a problem for Fidelity per se. It is a transition risk worth flagging during the onboarding conversation, particularly for households with multi-custodian structures or for clients we know will eventually need a more neutral aggregation layer.

For a client whose entire balance sheet already lives at Fidelity, Full View is a reasonable starting point. We use it as a triage instrument — a way to confirm the household's picture before recommending a more neutral tool. The GPS framework and the My Plan handoff do real planning work; they just do it inside a single vendor's