Pralana Gold is the one I liked the best. Especially if the other programs you've looked at lack the fidelity and options you need, Pralana Gold is for you. While the list below seems like a lot of complexity, life and the tax code are complex and the questions you asked are mostly tax optimization things, so you need a lot of fidelity to the tax code to make the right moves.
For income:
+You can provide details for all kinds of income streams, from annuities, reverse mortgages, taxable and non-taxable windfalls and general free form inputs. These include start and stop dates, annual % increase, % taxable and survivorship. It has special input sections if you are still working that takes SS taxes, self employment taxes, allows contributions to tax deferred, Roth, HSAs including company contributions to them.
+It automatically calculates RMDs from ordinary and inherited IRAs, SS benefits based on your PIA and claim age.
+You can track 10 rental properties including depreciation, improvements, rent and increases, purchase and sales price, etc. and 10 other properties such as your home, vacation home, etc.
+Investment returns
You break out total investment returns into non taxable, taxable as ordinary income, Qualified Dividends and retained long term gains (use your tax return to estimate these). You also provide current long term gains in your taxable account and any carryover losses. From there, the program calculates those each year and when you need to sell in taxable to raise cash, it figures out how much and determines the capital gains, AGI and taxes, including LTCG, NIIT and AMT.- it applies those specific AGI taxes in the following year to avoid iterative calculations.
Account drawdown optimization:
+Pralana has a module that, at the click of a button, optimizes the order of accounts to draw down, including taxable, Roth, your tax deferred, your spouse's tax deferred.
+After setting the general account withdrawal order, you can tell the program to withdraw any amount from any tax preferenced account in any given set of years to fine tune things. For instance, we could use our HSA or Roth if we were up against an IRMAA tier or had only highly appreciated stock as a source of cash.
Roth Conversions:
While there is an included very basic "Roth Conversion Optimizer", it only looks at your ordinary income tax bracket, so I would skip that tool and use the manual system. In manual, for each year, you select whose account to draw preferentially from, and limits based on the tightest of your selected ordinary income bracket, IRMAA tier, whether to stay below the LTCG tax phase-in, and the ACA FPL. That allows you to pretty quickly set up a plan that is very well tuned to the complexities of the tax code.
Other Tax Notes:
Pralana includes state taxes, moving between states, allows tax increases, reversion to the pre-TCJA that is scheduled to happen in 2026, and SS benefit cuts.
"Tax Efficient" Portfolio
Pralana allows you to hold bonds preferentially in tax deferred and stocks preferentially in other accounts (which it calls Mode 2), few other models allow this.
Alternatively, you can specify the stock/bond percentage in each account, which is what most competitor models allow, Pralana calls this Mode 1. In Mode 1, unless you model with the stock/bond allocations
equal in all accounts, you will fool yourself into making Roth Conversions that are
huge and incorrect. That is true in any model, and user manuals don't typically warn of it. When using static projections about the future, there is great benefit in increasing stock allocation (of course in the real world, increasing stock allocation comes with increased risk). That means if you tell the program you hold more stocks in Roth than in your IRA, calculations will show you should convert super fast, but it's mostly due to the increase in stock allocation, not the act of Roth Conversion. Use Mode 2 if you don't hold the same allocation in all accounts.
