I’m jumping the gun on this one, but I’m so excited to have stumbled across this financial planning tool that I want to share it with you now. Funny enough, Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot introduced me to this. I asked Copilot to help with a financial plan & after providing some insights & encouragement, the first link it provided was to planeasy.ca. This led me to their financial planning platform adviice.ca. While I’ve only played with it for a few hours yet, I’m really excited about what these guys are doing. And what this platform can do for DIY investors who are also doing DIY financial planning.

One of the drivers for DIY investors to do the DIY thing is our frugal nature. We want to save on investment & advisory fees so that we keep more of our money. That may, or may not, work out well for us, but we just can’t escape the desire to be frugal. This frugal nature also extends to financial planning. Though many DIY investors recognise the value of a financial plan, we tend not to want to pay the fee for having a plan done professionally. And no wonder, it’s not difficult to find fees in the two to five thousand dollar range for having a single financial plan prepared by a professional. Despite the value, that’s still a lot of coin for a one-shot deal. I’m not sure what plan revisions would cost in subsequent years, but it’s fair to assume that as time goes by & circumstances change, it probably makes sense to have the plan updated periodically.

Enter Adviice.ca!

If you’ve watched YouTube® videos on financial planning, you’ll have seen them use software for those sexy charts & graphs that are easily modified for viewing different scenarios. We know we want this, but the software isn’t available to non-professionals in many cases. And some of us are unwilling to pay the price for the professional to do a plan. The Adviice.ca platform costs $9 for a 30 day trial. And $9 a month if you decide to keep the subscription. At these prices, that’s almost 28 years of DIY financial planning for the same cost as one $3,000 plan! There are so many threads to weaving an accumulation or retirement plan. It is very difficult to do it on a notepad or with spreadsheets. Adviice does the calculation grunt work in the background & shows the results in an easy-to-read visual format. It’s also updated to reflect current details on taxation, government income streams, etc. At this point, I haven’t played with the platform for long enough to write a review. Frankly, I’m not qualified to do a real review anyway. The best I could do is provide a DIY appraisal of what I’ve found. However, this post is more about my early enthusiastic reaction to finding it & using it.

Within 2 hours of signing up for this platform, I had a rough-tuned retirement plan done. Much of that time was spent inputting the foundational data. It took another couple of hours to learn enough about how it worked to improve on the first pass. This particular plan embraces a situation that covers another three or four years of working, reviewing different RRSP drawdown strategies, looking at the tax implications of different withdrawal rates across different account types, & so on. I still have much to learn & a lot of fine-tuning to do, but I think I’ve got a pretty respectable financial plan pulled together already. Now the beauty of this is that you can spend as long as you want fine-tuning a plan. Or, to avoid the law of diminishing returns, you can book a one hour session with an advisor at Planeasy, or with other professionals using the platform. You can do this right within the Adviice platform. And for only $499! Or you can book a more comprehensive package for $1,999.00, which could include multiple retirement scenarios, additional tuning sessions, etc. The beauty of this offering is that you can do the DIY thing at a low cost, but then you can add some professional assessment at a lower price than the typical financial planning service might cost. Along with pandering to the hands-on thing favoured by many DIY folk, this could be a cost-effective combination of DIY & professional advice.

Rather than share screenshots, which won’t capture the full scope of what this platform really does, here’s a link to a PlanEasy YouTube® video that covers one example of doing a retirement plan for a couple. It captures a lot of the features & functionality of the system. If you’ve watched financial planning videos in the past, you’ll find a lot you can relate to in this. This clip shows the software with the green PlanEasy branding, mine has the blue Adviice branding, but is otherwise identical. Though there may be some additional features on the latest version. It’s not yet a perfect solution for all scenarios. I’d like to try scenarios where I pass away earlier than my spouse, for example. You can work around most of these limitations by manually adjusting the data columns, but it looks like they are working on improving the functionality & adding features on an ongoing basis. I joined their Reddit® group (r/adviice) where you’ll see feature requests & the company’s responses to these. They are really quick to respond to questions.

The biggest limitation to the client version that I’ve seen, so far, is that we can only create one foundational data set. In other words, short of starting over, we can only do our own plan, for a single or a couple. And that’s fair enough. The advisors pay more & can obviously prepare plans for multiple clients. For those who take advantage of a session with an advisor, the advisors can then use our base plans to add their professional input on top of ours. I guess part of the reason we can get the lower cost professional oversight is because we have already done the work to build the foundational data set. We can still, however, create multiple scenarios based on our own foundational data set. That allows us to explore different accumulation & withdrawal strategies, & so on.
The other limitation is that we cannot create reports. Those are delivered to us after a session with an Adviice advisor. That too is fair. It would be possible to change the foundational data to create reports for others if this was open. Just doing the DIY thing for ourselves, we can get all the relevant info right on the screen. And we can export the plan’s data, for those who want to play with the numbers in a spreadsheet. The reports are not essential for getting value from this software.

Bottom line is that I think this is the first affordable solution that is accessible for Canadians who want to be more involved in creating their own financial plan. Not only is it more affordable to begin with, but it may offer access to professional planning & fine tuning at a more affordable price too. It is a really smart product approach from this company. I think they will find many takers at $9 a month that might otherwise never have spent a penny on financial planning. And I think many of those takers will avail of the tune-up sessions with a professional advisor. And there will be those who will take advantage of the larger, more comprehensive professional support packages too. I hate this way-overused phrase, but this product has all the feel of one of those really good win-win solutions!

If I’m sounding like I work for these guys, I apologise, but I have absolutely no affiliation. I found it last weekend & I ponied up the $9 within 10 minutes of reading about it. Within an hour of playing with it, I knew this was going to be an enjoyable experience. When I compare the number of hours I spend with calculators & spreadsheets trying to do all this, Adviice is a great option for me. However, learning anything new does require some brain activity. And it might not be suitable for everyone. Of course, we all know that we need to challenge our brains as we age. And learning to use this will certainly exercise the brain.
In my case, that might be a bonus! 😜

Despite my enthusiasm, I would also strongly caution against using this as the total solution to a problem that you might not fully understand. If you don’t know enough to have confidence in your current DIY financial plan, you might not know enough to understand if the results produced by Adviice are good enough to live by. Particularly when it comes to depending on a plan that needs to survive your retirements years. I know I’ll enjoy playing & refining a plan with these tools going forward. But I will also take advantage of a one hour session with a professional down the road. Just in case I’ve screwed it up.
Please be careful here!
It may turn out that this product is not suitable for you. But if you enjoy doing this kind of thing, & if you are spending a lot of time with spreadsheets & online calculators, I highly recommend investing the $9 to test drive it.

While I have focused on the older demographic in the course of this conversation, this is also of potential value for the young accumulator.
At long last, there is almost an app for this stuff! LOL

A more recent update on using the Adviice.ca platform can be found at DIY Financial Planning… An Update

If you want to learn more about saving & investing from the ground up, I’d like to suggest that you check out Double Double Your Money, available at your local Amazon store.

Important – this is not investing, tax or legal advice, it is for entertainment & conversation-provoking purposes only. Data may not be accurate. Check the current & historical data carefully at any company’s or provider’s website, particularly where a specific product, stock or fund is mentioned. Opinions are my own & I regularly get things wrong, so do your own due diligence & seek professional advice before investing your money.