I stumbled upon this free planning tool recently:

https://www.futureadvisor.com/signin

and wanted to share in case anyone here is interested in giving it a whirl.

You link to your retirement account(s), kind of like Mint, or you can manually enter your holdings. You enter how old you are, how much you are saving annually, how much you earn, and how much income you want to have during retirement. It calculates your odds of success and makes recommendations. It is similar to Financial Engines.

I have played around with it a little. I wouldn't consider all of the recommendations, but I did consider and decide to implement some of them.

Note that Future Advisor is a fan of low-cost index ETFs (also available as funds). I am also a fan, so this is a good fit for me.

Some of its recommendations:

-Have 9% of portolio in REITs, an additional 9% in foreign REITs, for a total of 18%! I think that is too much, and I don't want to invest in foreign REITs. I did however buy some VNQ, Vanguard REIT Index. I am passing on VNQI, the foreign REIT index.

-Buy some ETFs in my Simple IRA. Um, I'm not able to buy any ETFs in my Simple IRA. I don't see anyplace where I can input this information, so I can't get any recommendations which are actually possible. If I bought the fund version, I would be paying additional fees since the amounts in each recommendation would be much less than 10k. Also, I have to pay an annual custodial fee per fund, so I prefer to have just 1 fund. I did sell Target Retirement 2030 in favor of Total Stock Market. This was a good idea. TR 2030 is composed of 3 index funds. To rebalance, I needed to know the percentage of each. By holding only 1 index fund, I have eliminated this step. I should have done it this way from the start.

-Sell my VXUS (Vanuard Total International) in favor of VEA (Vanguard Tax Managed International). A tax managed investment inside a tax advantaged account? This perplexed me for a while until I noticed that the expense ratio of VEA is slightly lower. A-ha! They are trying to save me a litte money. I haven't done it, though. VXUS has a bit of mid and small, VEA doesn't.

-Add some emerging markets. At first I rejected this idea as I know my VXUS holds some emerging markets. I examined its holdings and saw that it has only 5% in emerging markets. I had thought it was more than that. Since it has only 5%, that means about 1.25% of my entire portfolio is in emerging markets. That did seem too low, so I added some, although less than the recommendation.

-Sell small cap value in favor of small cap. Hmmm. Maybe. I haven't done this.

-Add a large value and an international large value. I did add a bit of each.

-Reduce bonds. This is probably the recommendation with the most impact. I considered for a few days, then I did it. The tipping point for me was looking at the amount of bonds in TR 2030. It is less than the amount of bonds I had.

So that is how I spent my Happy Friday afternoon this week.