Nearly every budgeting and planning tool now starts by asking you to connect your accounts. If you would rather not hand over banking credentials to a third party, that effectively rules out the category. planbend works entirely from figures you type in, and there is no connection option to decline.
Four things get you a real projection: your age and the age you want to stop, roughly what you spend in a month, your income, and the balance of each retirement or investment account. All of it is readable off a statement, and you can paste several accounts in at once rather than adding them one by one.
That is the whole trade. You spend a few minutes typing instead of a few seconds authenticating, and in exchange nothing of yours sits in an aggregator's database.
For a projection, no, and it is worth being precise about why. Account linking is extremely good at one thing: knowing that a particular card charge was groceries rather than restaurants. A retirement projection does not depend on that. It depends on your balances, what you add each year, what you spend, and assumptions about growth, inflation and tax, none of which arrive from a bank feed.
Where linking genuinely helps is day-to-day transaction tracking, and if that is what you want, a dedicated budgeting app does it well. If what you want is to know whether you can retire at 58, the connection buys you very little.
Balances do not update themselves. Your plan is as current as the last time you touched it, and if you never touch it, it quietly goes stale. That is a genuine cost and not worth pretending away.
In practice most people revisit a retirement plan a handful of times a year rather than daily, and updating a few balances takes under a minute. A plan you refresh each quarter is worth considerably more than the one you never built because the first screen asked for your bank password.
Nothing is held back because the data arrived by hand. The full engine runs either way: a year-by-year projection to life expectancy, federal and state tax, required minimum distributions, Social Security taxation, Roth conversion ladders, IRMAA thresholds, the health insurance gap before Medicare, 529 college overlap, Monte Carlo stress testing, and two people retiring on separate timelines.
There are also around twenty free calculators that need no account at all, if you would rather answer one narrow question before committing to anything.
Tools that are free and also expensive to run are usually being paid for by something other than the user. planbend is paid for by people subscribing to it. That is the arrangement under which a tool's incentives and yours stay pointed in the same direction, and it is the reason there is no connection flow to refuse in the first place.
If you want the longer version of what the tool actually does and where it stops, we wrote that up in full.
Free to use, no credit card, and nothing asks for a bank login. A few minutes of setup gets you a real projection.
Start planning free →