Given the current economic situation, conducting a financial planning practice isn't getting easier. With the financial uncertainty of the past several years, investors have become uncomfortable with the "business as usual" planning approach. To some extent, this is good news for planners, as it provides the opportunity to perform more in-depth planning for many clients, as well as providing clients with a more proactive approach to investing and planning. With investor goals undergoing frequent revisions, and the means to achieve those goals also increasingly unstable, clients are increasingly willing to allow you to play a more active part in monitoring their investments on an ongoing basis and suggesting changes when appropriate, not just at an annual or bi-annual planning session.

Each individual client represents a unique planning process. Clients vary greatly in their assets, planning goals, and willingness to take risks, and none of these areas are absolutes - all of them may change over time.

That makes basic analysis a moving target, and almost impossible to define in concrete terms. As a general rule, analysis software and tools fall into several very broad categories, although even a specialized application might be considered basic for a specific client or subset of clients.

In the reviews that follow, we look at a variety of different approaches to tools and applications. Some of these are very directed towards a specific area of planning, while others are more general computational or research tools.

Keep in mind, though, that depending on the makeup of your specific practice and client base, it's very possible that you may be best served with some combination of these (and possibly other) tools.

RETIREMENT PLAN ANALYZER

Brentmark Software does not take the approach of having an integrated suite of modular applications and calculators. Rather, it provides a number of stand-alone tools, each oriented to a specific area of financial and planning analysis. This array of tools includes the PFP Notebook, the Kugler Estate Analyzer, Estate Planning Tools, the Charitable Financial Planner, the Retirement Distributions Planner, the Savings Bond Toolkit, Estate Planning QuickView, and the Retirement Plan Analyzer that we looked at. Prices run from $79 for the Retirement Distributions Planner to $595 for the Retirement Plan Analyzer, so if you need the full spectrum of tools, you could spend a fair amount of money.

The Retirement Plan Analyzer, which was previously known as the Pension & Roth IRA Analyzer, is used to determine the results of strategies for taking distributions from traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, Roth 401(k)s and other types of qualified retirement plans. The application is capable of calculating up to four alternatives simultaneously, for up to 10 beneficiaries. The software has a State Death Tax Manager for calculating inheritance and estate taxes for all 50 states; can handle nondeductible and additional contributions to retirement plans; and allows you to model the growth of other assets as realized or unrealized capital gains.

While the user interface is somewhat stark, it's easy to understand and navigate. The Retirement Plan Analyzer can produce a nice selection of client reports, complete with graphics, and output them to a printer, PDF, text or word processing file, or to a spreadsheet file for further manipulation.

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