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Research Task

Section titled “Research Task”

Topic

Section titled “Topic”
  • Retirement Planning Software survey + recommendation
    • Identify the best retirement planning software for Canadians, available to individuals (not just advisors). Free preferred. Paid acceptable.
      • I am a researcher/author in the industry and may have access to advisor-only software (SnapProjections.com)
    • Quality and confidence in results is very important, as stakes in accurate analysis are very high. This is why a paid solution is worth it.
    • Features
      • Handles multiple types of accounts (taxable, RRSPs, TFSAs), and ideally including corporate investments (as a tax-deferred bucket).
      • Models net after-tax income, accounting for clawbacks (OAS, …)
      • Explores/optimizes different strategies and withdrawal sequencing
      • Probabilistic Monte Carlo simulations
    • Some Candidates to consider
      • listed below

Parameters

Section titled “Parameters”

Geography

  • Global
  • Specify: Canada only

Depth

  • Moderate (fast scan, key facts, 1–2 search passes)
  • Deep (comprehensive, parallel searches, cited sources)

Search Strategy

  • Scout first (quick angle scan → focused deep dive — recommended)
  • Direct dive (single-pass research, v1 behavior)

Goal (choose one or more)

  • Understand the landscape
  • Assess risks
  • Identify opportunities
  • Decision support

Sources

  • Cited in report
  • No citations needed

AI Sources

  • Claude (always active)
  • ChatGPT (requires OPENAI_API_KEY)
  • Gemini (requires GEMINI_API_KEY)
  • Grok (requires GROK_API_KEY)

Output

  • Append to task file (always)
    • Summarize results in a table, including name, URL, price, key features
    • Rank findings/recommendation based on Features (Top 3, Next 3 Contenders, Others)
  • Also export to Google Doc

Additional Context

Section titled “Additional Context”

Research Report

Section titled “Research Report”

Generated: 2026-08-21 · Claude Sonnet 5

Executive Summary

Section titled “Executive Summary”

Confidence: Medium (66)

Buy MoneyReady App (~$160 first year, $110 renewal) as your primary engine, and run RetireZest Premium ($47/yr) alongside it as an independent cross-check. MoneyReady is the only consumer-priced Canadian tool verified this session to simultaneously model registered/non-registered accounts, a CCPC bucket, federal and provincial after-tax income, OAS recovery tax for 65+, a withdrawal-and-CPP-start-date optimizer, and Monte Carlo simulation [1][2][3] — and it is the one tool that Canada’s most serious non-commercial DIY forum actually recommends by name [5]. RetireZest is the cheapest tool that publishes its own corporate-dividend mechanics in checkable detail and runs up to 10,000 simulations, which makes it a genuine second opinion rather than a second subscription [4][19]. No single tool clears every bar: MoneyReady models CCPCs but explicitly excludes them from its optimizer [2], and the tools with true mathematical sequencing optimization sit either at $499/yr (Optiml Legacy) or behind advisor gates — Snap Projections, the best pure modelling fit found, is contractually closed to non-advisors by its own terms of service regardless of industry employment [6]. Two structural cautions for an author citing this work: the Canadian “best software” listicle layer is overwhelmingly vendor-owned or machine-generated, and no vendor in this survey publishes its Monte Carlo return-generating process.

Landscape Overview

Section titled “Landscape Overview”

Confidence: High (88)

The Canadian individual-facing market splits into four tiers with a sharp capability cliff between them.

Tier 1 — free calculators ($0). Government and regulator tools are deterministic, pre-tax, fixed-sequence cash-flow projections. The OSC’s Retirement Cash Flow Calculator states in its own assumptions that it does not account for tax on withdrawals or non-registered earnings, does not include inflation, and hardcodes the naive drawdown order “RRIF, TFSA, Non-registered” [10]. Service Canada’s Canadian Retirement Income Calculator is a CPP/OAS entitlement estimator whose own text warns “Do not use the results for financial planning” [11]. No free Canadian tool found in this survey offers Monte Carlo, CCPC modelling, or sequencing optimization.

Tier 2 — Canadian-built DIY subscriptions ($40–$499/yr). RetireZest, Optiml, MoneyReady, and MyOwnFP. This is where the user’s feature list first becomes satisfiable, and where the primary recommendation lives [4][7][1][22].

Tier 3 — strong US engines with Canadian gaps. ProjectionLab is the exception that has built a real Canadian tax engine over five years [8][9]; Boldin’s own help centre states PlannerPlus is built exclusively on US tax law and “lacks options to manually adjust or apply non-U.S. tax rates” [13]; MaxiFi’s Canadian property is gone — canada.esplanner.com now 301-redirects to maxifi.com [14], and MaxiFi’s own site and pricing mention only federal/state/FICA taxes and Medicare [15][16]. WealthTrace ($229–$289/yr) is live and technically well-documented but its sample report and user manual contain zero occurrences of RRSP, TFSA, RRIF, OAS, CPP, or clawback [17].

Tier 4 — advisor-grade ($745–$2,500+/yr). Snap Projections, RazorPlan, Conquest, NaviPlan. Only RazorPlan has a soft enough access gate to be realistically purchasable by an individual [12].

Key Players & Entities

Section titled “Key Players & Entities”

Confidence: High (87)

RetireZest (retirezest.com) — Free tier ($0, 10 simulations then 3/month); Premium $5.99/mo or $47/yr [4]. Uniquely, CCPC modelling — capital dividend account (CDA), refundable dividend tax on hand (RDTOH), eligible vs non-eligible dividends, provincial passive-income rates — is on every tier including free [4][19]. Models CPP, OAS and GIS, and explicitly walks through dividend gross-up pushing income over the OAS threshold: a $60,000 eligible dividend reports as $82,800 of income (38% gross-up) versus $69,000 as non-eligible (15%), quantifying the OAS saving at over $2,000 [19]. Compares 8 predefined draw orders and recommends one [18][19]. Up to 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations, Premium only [4]. Weakness: limited defined-benefit pension modelling.

Optiml (optiml.ca) — Essentials $99/yr, Pro+ $249/yr, Legacy $499/yr; 14-day trial, no permanent free tier [7]. Its differentiator is mathematical optimization across accounts rather than strategy comparison, plus a dedicated “OAS Clawback Reducer” [26][7]. Corporate modelling (HoldCo, OpCo, CDA, GRIP, family trusts, salary-vs-dividend) is Legacy tier only; the probabilistic “Success Score” starts at Pro+ [7][26].

MoneyReady App (moneyreadyapp.ca) — Built by Elisabeth Tillier, Ph.D. [52]. Free: 3 TIME MACHINE runs; $60/mo extended trial; $160 first year, $110 renewal; advisor plans $390–$1,200 [1]. Models RRSP/RRIF/LIRA, TFSA, non-registered, CCPC, pensions and insurance with full federal + provincial tax and credits, pension income splitting, OAS clawback for 65+, CPP/QPP and survivor pensions, and GIS [1][2][20]. Withdrawal Optimizer minimizes tax or maximizes legacy and solves optimal CPP start date [2]. Wealthica integration syncs portfolios [20]. Two documented gaps: the optimizer “does not optimize Corporation accounts (CCPCs), RDSPs, or RESPs” — corporate payouts are configured manually [2][21] — and GIS is modelled but reported as still being worked into the optimizer’s tax layer [2].

MyOwnFP (myownfp.ca) — Free limited plan; Standard $40/yr; Unlimited $140/yr [22]. The widest account taxonomy found (RRSP, RRIF, DCPP, LIRA, LIF, TFSA, FHSA, RESP, non-registered, prescribed/non-prescribed/registered annuities, DB pension, mortgages/LOC) with full federal and provincial tax tables — but no corporate bucket, no Monte Carlo, and rules-based rather than optimized withdrawals [22].

ProjectionLab (projectionlab.com) — Basic $0/yr (Monte Carlo and historical backtesting included); Premium $129/yr (adds tax estimation and optimization); Pro $549/yr [9]. Its changelog documents a real Canadian build-out: TFSA/RRSP account types (2021), provincial tax presets ON/AB/BC/QC (2024), EI/CPP contributions plus OAS and GIS income streams and configurable RRSP→RRIF conversion age (v4.4.0, 2025), then CPP survivor benefits, pension income splitting, CPP sharing and eligible/non-eligible/foreign dividend composition with dividend tax credit estimation (v4.6.0, 2026) [8][28]. Canadian tax estimation is behind Premium. Corporate/CCPC is confirmed absent by primary evidence: its public feature board shows “Canadian Controlled Private Corporations (CCPC)” and “Canadian Professional Corporation” as open, unshipped suggestions [27].

PERC (perc-pro.ca, Fred Vettese) — free stripped-down version; full version $135 + tax/yr [24]. The site is JS-rendered and could not be verified at source [23]; it is described as focused on sustainable spending and CPP-timing rather than multi-account sequencing [24].

Advisor-grade. Snap Projections — $69–$99/user/month, Monte Carlo a $15/mo add-on effective Oct 1 2026; multi-CCPC with T2, RDTOH, CDA, GRIP gated to the Advisor Business tier; OAS clawback documented at source (2026 threshold $95,323, 15% recovery tax, deliberately computed on same-year income) [29][30]. Access is blocked: the signup flow states “Only financial professionals are eligible” [31] and the ToS requires licensure [6]. RazorPlan — $745/yr, Advanced $1,070/yr, Decumulation $1,610/yr; decumulation optimization and “solve CPP & OAS ages” only at the top tier; corporate planning from Advanced up [12]. No ToS clause prohibiting personal use was found and it advertises instant sign-up with a free 30-day trial [12][32]; the registration form’s fields could not be rendered, so a hidden credential field cannot be ruled out [33] [Partial]. RazorPlan Monte Carlo is [Unverified] — the vendor mentions “sequence of returns” and “variable rates of return” instead. Conquest Planning — enterprise/dealer distribution only, no self-serve channel; its engine (SAM) is explicitly deterministic, not stochastic [34][35]; dealer rate cards are internal to registered reps [36][37]. NaviPlan — negotiated B2B master subscription agreement that models end-clients only as portal users, never subscribers [38]; ~$2,500/licence/yr with holdco planning in the base licence [39]. PlanPlus/Planit was acquired by Morningstar on 2020-04-03 and planplus.com/ca/ now 404s [40][41]; whether ProPlanner still ships inside Morningstar’s Canadian stack is [Unverified].

Free second opinions. Honest Math (free) has the most configurable stochastic engine found — expected return, standard deviation, cross-asset correlation from −1.00 to 1.00, tunable fat tails — but no account objects and only three user-supplied tax scalars [42]. Flexible Retirement Planner (free) offers Taxable / Tax-Deferred / Tax-Free buckets that map near one-to-one onto non-registered/RRSP-RRIF/TFSA, driven by two user-entered rates, with 10,000 simulated sequences whose generation method is undocumented [43][44] [Unverified].

Two entries that did not survive verification. Allswealth renders client-side and returned only its title tag on both homepage and /pricing — no pricing or feature evidence obtainable [45] [Partial]. ProjX360 appears to be a conflation: search summaries described a Canadian retirement planner, but no fetched source produced an official URL, and projx360.com is an Arizona SaaS company selling project-management software for AV integrators [46]. Treat as spurious. RetireWare ceased accepting new subscriptions after 2021-12-31 [58], and moneypages.ca is a parked GoDaddy lander as of 2026-08-21 [61].

How It Works

Section titled “How It Works”

Confidence: High (86)

The four decision-critical features are not equally hard, and vendors use overlapping vocabulary for very different mechanics.

After-tax income and clawback. OAS recovery tax is a tax function: a tool with no tax engine cannot model clawback at all, which is why every $0 calculator fails here by construction [10]. Among paid tools, only Snap publishes its exact mechanic — and discloses a deliberate simplification, using same-year taxable income rather than CRA’s prior-year basis [30]. RetireZest publishes the dividend gross-up arithmetic that drives corporate-account clawback [19]. Whether ProjectionLab actually computes OAS recovery tax, versus merely modelling OAS as an income stream, is [Unresolved] — its changelog says “OAS estimated income stream” [8][28] and its RRSP-meltdown help article names clawback as motivation without stating that recovery tax auto-calculates [48]. This is the single highest-value question to settle in a free trial.

“Withdrawal strategies” means three different things. (a) Strategy comparison — RetireZest evaluates 8 named draw orders on your numbers and picks the winner [18]. (b) Solver — Optiml and RazorPlan’s Decumulation tier run optimization over sequencing and CPP/OAS timing, which can produce a year-by-year hybrid no named strategy expresses [26][12]. (c) Spending-rate rules — ProjectionLab’s “withdrawal strategies” are Initial %, Ratcheting SWR, VPW and Guyton-Klinger, which its own help describes as orthogonal to the normal planning experience; this is not sequencing optimization [47].

Monte Carlo depth varies by two orders of magnitude, and nobody documents the process. RetireZest advertises up to 10,000 simulations [4]; Flexible Retirement Planner runs 10,000 trials [44]; WealthTrace runs only 1,000 but genuinely re-runs the whole plan per trial with per-asset-class volatility and cross-asset correlations calibrated on ~50 years, plus an optional Laplace distribution for fat tails [49]; MoneyReady runs 100 simulations off a Society-of-Actuaries-framework market model with regime-switching equity volatility, dividend yields, inflation, rates, yield curve and USD/CAD, reporting 10/25/median/75/90 quantile fans rather than a single success probability [3]; Optiml’s product page says “hundreds” while its own guide says 50 [26][53]. Fifty paths is not a distribution in any meaningful statistical sense. No vendor in this survey publishes whether returns are parametric or bootstrapped, or how sequence-of-returns risk is generated. For an author, MoneyReady’s documented model framework and quantile output are more citable than a larger raw trial count with no stated process.

Trends & Developments

Section titled “Trends & Developments”

Confidence: Medium (64)

The Canadian comparison layer is compromised. The top-ranking “best retirement planning software in Canada” results are vendor-owned editorial: Optiml’s and RetireZest’s guides each rate themselves favourably while under-describing the other [53][63], and cinder.fi is similarly commercial [54]. Blocking those domains surfaces template-identical AI-generated SEO farm pages (wifitalents, gitnux, worldmetrics, zipdo) that contradict each other on checkable facts — one claims ProjectionLab has GIS, another claims it doesn’t, and one falsely describes the US-built Flexible Retirement Planner as “Canadian-specific” [55]. These were discarded, not used as evidence. Where vendor guides disagreed, only the official product page of the tool being described was treated as evidence.

Community traction inverts the marketing ranking. On Financial Wisdom Forum — Canada’s Bogleheads analogue, no commercial stake, four substantive threads 2020–2025 fetched in full — MoneyReady is closest to consensus (“really good for retirement planning and certainly the best option out there”; “great app” for CPP timing and account drawdown), with the recurring criticism that it takes “considerable effort to learn and enter data accurately” and forum-reported pricing of “$160 first year, $100 renewals” [5]. MayRetire (free) is the most-discussed recent tool, with developer participation and reported spousal RRIF optimization, post-65 CPP splitting and a CCPC-as-unregistered workaround [5] — but no official URL was captured this session, so it is carried as [Unverified] and should be checked before use. Adviice (~$49/yr) appears as a deliberate fee-avoidance choice [5], also [Unverified] on URL and features. By contrast, Optiml and RetireMint appear in zero retrieved FWF threads despite Optiml’s marketing dominance, and ProjectionLab draws one passing mention; substantial Bogleheads discussion of ProjectionLab is entirely US-jurisdiction (Roth conversions, ACA, NIIT, IRMAA) and says nothing about Canadian tax fidelity [56]. Independent Optiml coverage exists (moneyengineer.ca, RedFlagDeals) but both were inaccessible this session (403/paywall) — this is “strong marketing reach, near-zero forum footprint, unverified independent review coverage,” not a dismissal.

Monte Carlo is contested, not assumed valuable, among sophisticated Canadian practitioners. FWF members called it “pseudo-scientific” and cited Bernstein — “any estimate of long-term financial success greater than about 80% is meaningless”; another observed the difference in retirement income confidence between a 1% and an 8% appreciation rate is only 8%, i.e. the probabilistic layer moves the answer far less than the input assumptions do [5]. Implication: treat Monte Carlo as a tiebreaker, not a primary selection criterion.

Explicit gaps in this angle. Reddit was entirely inaccessible this session (blocked at user-agent level for both search and fetch) — no claim rests on it, and it is the largest limitation of the credibility check. canada.ca returned 403 to direct fetch; its calculator content came from a Wayback snapshot and the interactive tool was never run [11] [Partial]. Desjardins, Mawer and Steadyhand calculators — the three free picks in an independent 18-calculator survey [59] — were not tested directly; that survey never uses the words “Monte Carlo,” “probabilistic,” or “OAS clawback” anywhere, which is itself informative, and its author cautions “I can’t fully endorse any of these tools since I can’t see under the hood” [59].

Context & Background

Section titled “Context & Background”

Confidence: Medium-High (75)

Two framing corrections matter for a researcher. First, “free vs paid” is the wrong axis; jurisdiction first, then rigor within it is the right one. WealthTrace at $229–$289/yr buys a well-correlated simulation engine bolted to the wrong tax code — precision without accuracy, and dangerous precisely because the output looks authoritative [17][49][50][51]. Second, corporate/CCPC modelling is the sharpest dividing line in the market and it is mostly priced as an advisor feature: NaviPlan includes holdco in its base licence (+$500/yr for opco) [39], Snap gates multi-CCPC to $99/user/mo [29], RazorPlan to $1,070/yr [12], Optiml to $499/yr [7], and Conquest treats private corporations as an “advanced plan” at double the standard rate [36][37]. RetireZest putting CCPC on its free tier is the genuine anomaly in this market [4]. Note also that “Boomer & Echo / Kyle Prevost” is a $500 course, not free software [62], and that RetireMint, though free and Canadian, is a lifestyle-transition platform spanning 14 topics with no documented account, tax, OAS, sequencing or Monte Carlo modelling — a category mismatch rather than a weak competitor [25].

Options Analysis

Section titled “Options Analysis”

Confidence: High (85)

Unified ranked table

Section titled “Unified ranked table”

Top 3

NameURLPrice (CAD)Key Features
MoneyReady Appmoneyreadyapp.caFree (3 runs); $160 yr1 / $110 renewalBroadest verified Canadian set: RRSP/RRIF/LIRA/TFSA/non-reg/CCPC/pensions/insurance, federal+provincial tax & credits, OAS clawback 65+, GIS, pension splitting, Withdrawal Optimizer + CPP start-date solver, 100-sim SOA-framework Monte Carlo with quantile fans, Wealthica sync. Optimizer excludes CCPCs [1][2][3][20][21]
RetireZestretirezest.comFree tier usable; $47/yr PremiumCCPC (CDA, RDTOH, eligible/non-eligible dividends) on free tier; CPP/OAS/GIS incl. dividend gross-up clawback mechanics published; compares 8 draw orders; up to 10,000 sims (Premium). Weak DB pension modelling [4][18][19]
Optimloptiml.ca$99 / $249 / $499/yr; 14-day trialTrue solver over sequencing + CPP/OAS timing; OAS Clawback Reducer; HoldCo/OpCo/CDA/GRIP/trusts at Legacy only; “Success Score” thin — vendor’s own guide says 50 scenarios [7][26][53]

Next 3 Contenders

NameURLPrice (CAD)Key Features
ProjectionLabprojectionlab.com$0 Basic; $129/yr Premium; $549 ProOnly genuine Canadian tax engine outside Canadian-built tools: TFSA/RRSP, provincial presets, CPP+survivor+sharing, OAS & GIS streams, pension splitting, dividend composition + DTC. Monte Carlo on all tiers. No CCPC (open feature request); “withdrawal strategies” are spending rules, not sequencing; OAS recovery-tax computation [Unresolved] [8][9][27][28][47][48]
RazorPlanrazorplan.com$745 / $1,070 / $1,610/yr; 30-day free trialDeepest explicit decumulation optimizer + “Solve CPP & OAS Ages” (top tier only); corporate/business-owner planning from Advanced; more manual control than Conquest/Snap per trade press. Nominally advisor-only but no ToS bar found — Monte Carlo [Unverified] [12][32][33][57]
MyOwnFPmyownfp.caFree limited; $40 / $140/yrWidest account taxonomy + full federal/provincial tax tables and credits. No corporate bucket, no Monte Carlo, rules-based not optimized [22]

Others

NameURLPriceStatus / Key Features
PERCperc-pro.caFree version; $135+tax/yrIndependent actuary’s sustainable-spending & CPP-timing tool; site JS-rendered, features not verifiable at source [23][24]
Flexible Retirement Plannerflexibleretirementplanner.comFreeTaxable/Tax-Deferred/Tax-Free buckets map cleanly to Canada; 10,000 trials; you supply all tax intelligence; method undocumented [43][44]
Honest Mathhonestmath.comFreeBest-configured stochastic engine (correlation, fat tails); no accounts, one effective tax rate — stress-test companion only [42]
MayRetire— [Unverified]FreeMost-discussed recent free tool on FWF; spousal RRIF, CPP splitting, CCPC workaround — no official URL verified [5]
Adviice— [Unverified]~$49/yr (forum-reported)Used by FWF members as fee-avoidance [5]
Snap Projectionssnapprojections.com$69–$99/user/mo + $15/mo MCBest modelling fit found; access blocked by ToS (licensure required) [6][29][30][31]
Conquest Planningconquestplanning.comDealer-onlyNo individual channel; deterministic engine; MC & clawback [Unverified] [34][35][36][37]
NaviPlaninvestcloud.com~$2,500/licence/yrEnterprise MSA only; holdco in base licence; MC & clawback [Unverified] [38][39]
WealthTracemywealthtrace.com$229 / $289 / $1,049/yrStrong documented MC (1,000 trials, correlations, Laplace tails); US tax only, zero Canadian terms in manual or sample report [17][49][50][51]
Boldinboldin.com~$12/moVendor states it cannot apply non-US tax rates — recommend against [13]
MaxiFi / ESPlanner Canadamaxifi.com$109–$359/yrCanadian property discontinued; canada.esplanner.com 301s to maxifi.com [14][15][16]
Service Canada CRICcanada.caFreeCPP/OAS entitlement estimator grounded in your actual contribution record — a good input, not a planner [11]
GetSmarterAboutMoneygetsmarteraboutmoney.caFreePre-tax, no inflation, hardcoded naive drawdown order [10]
RetireMintretiremint.caFreeLifestyle-transition platform, no projection engine [25]
Allswealthallswealth.comUnknownClient-side rendered; nothing verifiable [45]
RetireWare / PlanPlus / MoneyPages / ProjX360——Discontinued 2021 [58]; acquired by Morningstar 2020 [40][41]; parked domain [61]; likely spurious [46]

Trade-offs

Section titled “Trade-offs”

Confidence: Medium-High (78)

Corporate investments are the binding constraint. If a CCPC bucket must be optimized rather than merely modelled, nothing at consumer pricing delivers it: MoneyReady models it but excludes it from the optimizer [2][21], RetireZest models and compares strategies including corporate-first draws [18][19], and true solver-plus-corporate arrives only at Optiml Legacy ($499/yr) or RazorPlan Advanced/Decumulation ($1,070–$1,610/yr) [7][12]. A one-off engagement with a fee-only planner running Snap or Conquest may outperform any subscription for that specific question — though one FWF member who engaged a CFA fee-for-service planner reported being “disappointed” after four weeks and judged free software output superior [5].

Optimizer versus comparator. An 8-strategy bake-off finds the best named strategy; a solver can find a year-by-year hybrid no named strategy expresses. For a researcher writing about decumulation, having both in hand is more informative than either alone — which is a further argument for the paired-tool structure below.

Learning cost is real and asymmetric. MoneyReady’s own community flags “considerable effort to learn and enter data accurately” [5]. Budget setup time, not just subscription cost.

Provenance risk on free tools. FWF members raised that an unknown free web app’s sponsor “may well be collecting results… and may well be able to tie a result to one’s IP address”; they partially resolved this by testing in incognito/airplane mode and found only one analytics call, rating the concern low [5]. For an author entering real numbers, this is worth a deliberate decision rather than a default.

Recommendation

Section titled “Recommendation”

Confidence: High (84)

Primary: MoneyReady App — $160 first year, $110 renewal. It is the only consumer-priced tool independently verified to cover every requirement on the list at once — multi-account including CCPC, full federal/provincial after-tax income, OAS recovery tax, GIS, a withdrawal-and-CPP-timing optimizer, and a documented Monte Carlo model [1][2][3][20] — and it is the only one carrying substantive endorsement from a non-commercial Canadian practitioner community rather than from its own marketing [5]. For a researcher who will be quoting outputs, its published model framework and quantile-fan presentation are more defensible than a competitor’s larger unspecified trial count.

Complement: RetireZest Premium — $47/yr. Buy it as a cross-check, not as a fallback. It is a structurally independent engine, it publishes the corporate dividend gross-up arithmetic that drives OAS clawback so the outputs are auditable against your own hand calculations [19], it covers the one thing MoneyReady’s optimizer explicitly skips — evaluating corporate-first versus RRIF-first draw orders [18] — and at $47/yr it costs less than the error it would catch.

Why one primary plus one cross-check beats hunting for a single perfect tool. No tool in this survey clears all four bars: the best-modelling tool (Snap) is contractually unavailable [6], the best solver-plus-corporate combination costs $499–$1,610/yr [7][12], the best Canadian US-built engine has no CCPC support and an unresolved clawback question [27][48], and the tool with the largest simulation counts has weaker DB-pension handling [4]. Meanwhile every vendor’s Monte Carlo methodology is undocumented, which means a single tool’s output is a single unaudited claim. Two independent engines agreeing on a decumulation sequence is materially stronger evidence than either one alone — and the combined cost is $207 in year one, less than one tier of Optiml.

When a different choice is better. If corporate/CCPC integration is the central modelling question rather than one input among many, skip this pairing and go to Optiml Legacy at $499/yr [7] — it is the only consumer-channel product combining a genuine solver with HoldCo/OpCo/CDA/GRIP/trust structures. If you want scenario-comparison UX and cross-jurisdiction methodology for authoring work, add ProjectionLab Premium at $129/yr [9] — but verify OAS recovery-tax computation on the free tier before paying.

Next Steps

Section titled “Next Steps”
  1. Start the free tiers of both recommended tools this week — cost $0. Run MoneyReady’s 3 free TIME MACHINE passes [1] and RetireZest’s free tier (10 simulations, CCPC included) [4] on the same input set, and compare the recommended draw sequence. Divergence between them is the single most informative diagnostic available before you spend anything.
  2. Settle the ProjectionLab OAS question empirically. On the free tier, enter retirement income above the 2026 threshold ($95,323 per Snap’s documentation [30]) and read whether the tax output reflects a 15% recovery tax. The changelog says OAS is an income stream; whether recovery tax auto-calculates is unresolved in every source retrieved [8][48].
  3. Run the RazorPlan 5-minute self-test. It advertises instant sign-up with a free 30-day trial and no payment required, and no ToS clause barring personal use was found [12][32]; the registration form’s fields could not be rendered this session [33]. If it opens, use the trial to confirm whether Monte Carlo exists at all — currently [Unverified] — before considering the $1,610/yr Decumulation tier. Do not attempt Snap Projections: its ToS requires licensure, and industry employment alone would not satisfy the plain text [6].
  4. Verify MayRetire before trusting it. It is the most-discussed free tool in the Canadian community, with reported spousal RRIF optimization and a CCPC path [5], but no official URL was verified this session. Locate the canonical site, and heed the forum’s own provenance caution — test in a private session with representative-but-not-real figures first.
  5. Pull your actual CPP/OAS entitlement from Service Canada’s calculator and feed it as input to whichever tool you adopt [11]. It is grounded in your real Statement of Contributions and residence history — authoritative as an input even though its own text disclaims it for planning.
  6. For authoring: cite the mechanics, not the marketing. The only two sources in this survey that publish checkable computation detail are Snap’s OAS clawback article (including its documented deviation from CRA’s prior-year basis) [30] and RetireZest’s dividend gross-up worked example [19]. Treat optiml.ca, retirezest.com and cinder.fi comparison posts as vendor claims [53][54][63], and discard the wifitalents/gitnux/worldmetrics/zipdo cluster entirely — the pages are template-identical and mutually contradictory on verifiable facts [55].

Sources

Section titled “Sources”