American Express New Financial Planning Tool

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RoboFan
Posts: 66
Joined: Thu Apr 27, 2017 7:17 am

American Express New Financial Planning Tool

Post by RoboFan »

Apparently, American Express launched a six-month pilot of a new financial planning tool (My Financial Plan) on July 11 of this year, with the idea to test the app in 25,000 “select” Amex card users. I received an email today inviting me to sign up for this. Does anyone know anything about this program? I’m interested in signing up, but the description they provide is pretty sparse. For example, it’s clear they want access to all your investment information, but it’s not clear if they are planning on providing any analysis of this information. Does anyone know if it provides an analysis of your asset allocation, or break the analysis into domestic and foreign categories? If so, how do the tools compare to Vanguard’s existing portfolio analysis tools? Likewise, it’s clear they are planning to provide budgeting tools. Does anyone know how these tools compare to Mint’s budgeting tools? They mention cash flow analysis. Does anyone know if the cash flow tables apply to retirement cash flow similar to what Personal Capital provides? I’m just looking for enough information to determine whether it’s worth the effort to sign up.
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prudent
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Re: American Express New Financial Planning Tool

Post by prudent »

According to the Terms & Conditions, they partner with BodesWell to do the analysis. You can go to the BodesWell site and try it out. I found it difficult to use, much less straightforward than the Fidelity planner.
student
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Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 6:58 am

Re: American Express New Financial Planning Tool

Post by student »

I also went to Bodeswell and tried it myself. I do not like it. I prefer the ones from Fidelity and Personal Capital.
motiv8ed
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Joined: Fri Jul 03, 2020 9:37 pm

Re: American Express New Financial Planning Tool

Post by motiv8ed »

My experience was similar to the comments, above. I was excited to try it, but couldn't get it to do even the most basic things. I fought with it for a while, then deleted my account.

Even if they send me another invite, I'm not going to waste my time again.



motiv8ed
Topic Author
RoboFan
Posts: 66
Joined: Thu Apr 27, 2017 7:17 am

Re: American Express New Financial Planning Tool

Post by RoboFan »

Thanks for the replies. I went to the BodesWell site and tried it out for myself. I’m not planning on spending any more time on this. Most disappointing was the cash flow analysis. Here, as you might expect, it provided an estimated cash flow based on current salary, savings, planned retirement date, planned time to start social security, anticipated spending, and life expectancy. I was expecting the income attributed to salary to go to zero at the species retirement date, and new income to appear at at the specified time to begin drawing social security. However, I could not get time scales to align, with the app continuing to report a monthly salary months after the retirement date. Other apps are much better at doing this (the free Personal Capital app does this quite nicely).

The BodesWell website has a video highlighting the app’s ability to correctly categorize budget items. In fairness, I did not test this and while I’ve been using the Mint app to do this I have to admit Mint does mischaracterize a lot of items. The ability to better characterize spending items might be a plus for this app, but if it does get the projected cash flow correct, it is not enough.

The app does not provide any portfolio analysis. Ideally, the app could access portfolio analysis from another app - e.g. Vanguard’s portfolio watch- to get an estimate of the likelihood of you having sufficient funds to reach your retirement goals. However, there is no indication AmEx is planning on adding the ability to independently do this, or that it’s planning on bringing the data in from a different app.

Bottom line, Personal Capital does a much better job of combining portfolio analysis with cash flow, and budget analysis. Be great if AmEx. were to commit to providing similar analysis. But without some indication that they are planning to do so, I will not be using this version.
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