Kara Brandt for MaxiFi Testimonial

Speaker: Kara Brandt, Instructor Pilot / Consultant

Kara Brandt: We chose MaxiFi, because it was literally the only thing we could find that gave us legitimate concrete answers, not speculations, not guesses or approximations. And my husband and I used to, feel like we were on the hope plan. We were saving and hoping that it was enough. And then, obviously, once we retired, we'd be spending and hoping it would last. And, we felt like there's got to be something out there that can give us more than just guesses of --you know-- yeah, take 80% or 85% and that should be fine. But it seemed to me, especially when I looked at all of the people around me who were approaching retirement. that we all sort of had different situations and so how would those situations apply to all of us when we were all a little bit different? Anyway, I wanted something that was customized for me that actually gave me the answer to my situation. I knew what my income and assets were. I knew what my responsibilities and obligations and expenses were. And it just seemed like there had to be something that I could take that information and get like a solid, no kidding, concrete answer. Anyway, and that's what MaxiFi did, does-- love it!

Kara Brandt: The fact that it gives you maximum discretionary spending- I love that. It tells you what you can spend. I doesn't ever ask you what you want to spend. So that is great. Obviously, I love the concrete, the fact that it just gives you a single answer based on the information you've input. I like, I really like the features where you can go in and make different assumptions. Do I think inflation is going to get worse? Do I think Social Security is going to get cut? Those kinds of things so I can see what might happen when I start seeing sort of the doom and gloom out there in the world, especially right now with all the, you know, instability with Social Security and what's going on with that. And so it gave me a lot of comfort when I was able to run it and go, all right, well, what if this happened and then I could see how it might affect my life. Other features? Love the alternate plans, the alternative plans that it has being able to set up. We were able to decide if my husband could retire early and how that would affect our lifestyle. Having the answer to stuff like that is great. And then we were maybe thinking about doing a little bit of some reworking of our yard--do a yard remodel, and we wanted to see how that would affect us. It's nice to be able to answer the question is it worth it? And when you don't know how it's gonna affect you downstream, you can't necessarily answer that question. And then the optimizers-- so I love the optimizers. We did our Social Security one, which was great, and then now with the new Roth conversion one--that's been awesome too. So those are some of my favorite features.

Kara Brandt: MaxiFi was not difficult to set up and use. There's actually a ton of support within the software. There's little question marks you can check on, or you can click on, and they give you details about the page. There's a screen guide that gives you details about what you're inputting and why. To me, it's actually pretty intuitive, and the support is amazing. So whenever I would run into little snags or questions or what does this mean, mostly I ran into those things about the things that I, I didn't have. So I don't have an annuity. I don't have a pension. I don't have that kind of stuff. And that's really where I would sort of go, --hmm do I need to worry about this? And of course, 99 times out of 100, the answer was, no, I didn't need to worry about it. But lots of support inside the program, and then there's lots outside too. There was a great learning center, that actually my husband in particular spent tons of time looking at, and would have me sort of watch some stuff. I think it's just the right amount of complex. You can't get a good answer back. What is it that's that expression? Garbage in, Garbage out. I mean, there is a certain amount of information and a certain amount of time and energy that you have to go to to get the right data in there, the correct information in there. So that you get out something that's truly valuable to you. And so that's kind of how I felt. But overall, not difficult to use, just takes a little time and effort, but it was well worth it. Every second, well worth it.

Kara Brandt: MaxiFi did help us make several important financial decisions. The initial one just simply being the question we had been searching for for years, or the answer that we've been searching for--for years, which was, can we, are we on track? So based off of our savings level, and we thought we were saving enough, but I don't know, are we? Based on our savings level, could we retire when we had sort of originally planned to retire? And very happily, luckily, the answer came back, yes, that we were actually in in good shape. After that, we actually wanted to know what would happen if my husband retired early, and so we ran some alternate plans for that. And then once we were able to see the results, sort of the consequences of, well, if he does retire early, it will mean this for our lifestyle. Then it was actually a really nice day to day decision about how to proceed with that. It really took, I think, a lot of pressure off. Having the uncertainty can be really stressful. And so it was nice to kind of know-- yes or no, you know, what is the answer? Another big one-- I actually ended up transitioning out of my job into a new position. And that one--there were a lot of financial ramifications associated with that. So it's extremely nice to know how that was going to affect us. And then on top of it, we actually have done my son, who's 26, was interested in maybe buying a house, but obviously, we all know what's happened with the price of real estate. So he ended up seeing what was going to happen, down, and, you know, obviously he's very young, but he was able to see with his plan, how much it would affect him if he bought a house at a certain level, at a certain time. And so it really helped educate him, and give him choices about how he wanted to proceed. with his house purchase and just for everyone's knowledge, he decided to wait, which we were pleased to hear, because it's crazy, the price of real estate right now.

Kara Brandt: We did not have a formal long term financial plan before MaxiFi, although we were desperately searching for one. We had interviewed people, we had definitely been researching and looking, and we've done a lot of our own research about retirement, retirement needs, but the plan itself, we like to call the hope plan, which is that we would save as much as we could and hope that was enough. And then once we retired and started spending money, we would really hope that we were going to be able to maintain our standard of living and not run out of money. So yeah, before MaxiFi, nothing formal. Much better having MaxiFi as our long term plan. Now we don't need to hope we actually have no kidding, the concrete numbers and it's been incredibly useful and incredibly valuable to our lives.