Isn’t the Internet wonderful? We can do so many things, unthinkable a decade or so ago, without even leaving our homes - or even talking to anyone. This now includes getting a holistic financial plan without ever having to meet with or speak to an advisor. This is all thanks to a website called Boulevard R that we recently discovered and which appears to offer a pretty intriguing service. Web-based tools like this often catch our eye and we thought it was worth sharing our initial impressions of Boulevard R with you.
To be sure, online tools that deliver a high-level “plan of action” based on the user’s responses to a questionnaire are not new. Online brokerage firms like Fidelity have offered these tools for years and some are pretty impressive. Boulevard R, however, isn’t a brokerage firm. This is key to their value proposition. Their advice claims to be more objective since they aren’t trying to get you to buy their mutual funds or otherwise invest with them. This independence is heavily touted on the firm’s website and we think that it’s an important distinction. Additionally, they say every PDF financial plan - which the company calls its “Roadmap” - is prepared by a Certified Financial Planner, and not a calculator that simply spits out results. Considering the price tag, that’s pretty hard to believe.
So what is the cost for this service? A mere $49. Forgo one dinner out at a restaurant and you can get yourself a full financial plan. Sounds generous, doesn’t it? Well, the company actually lets users try out its online platform for free without even having to sign up. Users answer a series of questions relating to their current financial situation, future financial goals, retirement goals, savings, income and investments. A Flash-based results page then opens, which illustrates the user’s anticipated surplus or shortfall and allows the user to tinker with inputs to see the effect on the results. Users can also print a PDF summary for free. In order to request the full PDF Roadmap (which the site says is 30+ pages), they must sign up and pay. We’re not sure if this is how the full plan works yet but if it is similar, we don’t see how they can say a CFP put this together (more on this next week).
Boulevard R’s target audience is those investors with under $500,000 in investable assets. These are the folks that are now often ignored by the full-service brokerage firms that typically provide comprehensive financial planning services. As it is, high net worth individuals and older, more conservative investors usually prefer face-to-face contact with a financial advisor or planner to an online planning tool. Clearly, Boulevard R is after the Internet-savvy Gen-X market, as well as those that just can’t afford a traditional fee-based financial plan but are willing to spend a small amount of money to better understand their financial future. In any event, it will certainly be interesting to see whether Boulevard R will prove successful in bringing low-fee online planning to the masses and whether this type of independent, on-demand service is the next big thing.
Blogging has been around for years now. It’s a socially acceptable way to get your opinion out on the Web without fear of rejection (you can control the comments…) and with relative ease. What was once Web Logging has evolved significantly in the past few years, expanding from simple paragraph entries that were more personal in nature to magazine-type formatted text and images that need a CMS to organize entries properly.
