Overall, I think RetireMark has promise, but in its current format I see at least two drawbacks. One is that the "investment phase" of the program, which takes a projected health-care need in today's dollars, assumes there will be a lump-sum investment and projects that the investment results will be weak. You have three phases of retirement as the default, each with a projected straight-line return. Probably not the methodology most planners I know would use, particularly when they're dealing with a potential investment horizon of 40 years or more.

But that is just a symptom of the larger problem, which is that there is no integration with the major financial planning applications. If you could use RetireMark to calculate more realistic health-care costs and feed those numbers into your financial planning application, you could bypass RetireMark's weak investment analysis and come up with a much better, more integrated financial planning report. Hopefully, we'll see some sort of integration with suitable partners in the near future.

For now, RetireMark remains an interesting supplemental tool for financial planners. It is reasonably priced at the current annual rate of roughly $500. If it could help planners and their clients better address retiree health-care costs, that price seems reasonable indeed.

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