MoneyGuide makes the plan page an annuity shelf

MoneyGuide just put the annuity inside the plan, and the income floor now has a projection line, which turns the retirement income conversation from whether guaranteed income belongs in a client's plan into which annuity the plan shows. For the advisor at the desk, planning software stopped being a tool for teaching decumulation and became a shelf.

The change is narrow, but the consequence is not. MoneyGuide can now model annuity income within the same projection as the portfolio, so the client no longer sees a securities plan next to a separate insurance illustration—just one chart, one failure rate, one floor. The advisor who used to spend the first meeting explaining what an annuity does now spends it choosing which annuity to select, because the software has already done the explaining. Whether that saves time or costs control depends on what the advisor does before the client ever opens the plan.

The launch coverage describes the shift directly: the decumulation fight has moved from illustration to product selection. Illustration is an educational exercise in which the advisor shows a client what happens to a portfolio under different assumptions; product selection is a purchase decision, and the plan now contains a line that names an income stream. The only remaining questions are which carrier, which guarantee, and at what cost, and the software has compressed all of that into a toggle. That compression is the point, and it is the risk.

Edelman's inaugural confidence report shows why the toggle matters: it finds that 84% of pre-retirees want an active role in their retirement decisions, but 60% cannot say how their savings are invested—the exact client who will approve a projection line without asking the next question, with the appetite for control and none of the vocabulary for it. When the software puts an annuity inside the same chart as the portfolio, the client is being asked to sign off on a product selection, not to learn the mechanics of longevity pooling or lifetime income riders. The advisor who treats the updated model as just another software feature is likely handing the floor decision to a default list, and the client will never know the difference.

That dynamic is why PWD's coverage of the report argues for income floor and reserve planning ahead of any education effort. If the goal is to give a client a reliable base of income, the conversation should start with what the floor must cover and what assets remain in reserve, and education can follow. MoneyGuide's update, by contrast, front-loads the product: the floor is no longer a concept to be designed; it is a line item to be selected. An advisor who has not already decided what belongs in that line item is walking into the meeting without a shelf, and the software will supply one.

BlackRock's 401(k) default embeds guaranteed income and private assets, which means the employer plan now starts the income decision before the rollover and moves the fall's tax checkpoints after it. A participant who has been defaulted into guaranteed income inside the plan will arrive at the advisor's desk already familiar with the idea that the plan itself produces a paycheck, not just a lump sum to be drawn down. MoneyGuide's retail-planning update is the same logic applied to the individual plan: the annuity is no longer something the advisor introduces; it is already in the projection, so the rollover meeting becomes a continuation, not an opening.

That matters for the client who still thinks of the 401(k) as savings and the rollover as the moment income planning begins, because the software and the plan sponsor have already moved that line. For the advisor, the practical consequence is that the in-plan annuity decision is now made before any standalone sale, and the client who has seen guaranteed income inside the plan projection will expect the advisor's outside plan to at least match it. The floor decision now happens on the plan page, and the advisor who arrives at that page without a point of view on which annuities belong there is already behind the default.

The Vanguard survey offers the third piece: 72% of advisors list more client time as a priority, while most are still a layer away from the client-facing hours they say they want. A planning tool that automatically models annuities should, in theory, give back some of that time, but it also raises the cost of getting the product decision wrong. The 84% who want control and the 60% who cannot name their investments are the same clients for whom a one-click annuity illustration looks like a recommendation. The advisor's highest-value client-facing hour is now partly a product-selection hour, and the practices that treat it as pure education will likely lose the income-floor decision to whoever built the default shelf.

That is not an argument against the software; it is an argument for using it deliberately. MoneyGuide's update forces the advisor to decide what the plan will show before the client sees it, because the client will see something. The choices made in that setup conversation, not the client meeting, determine whether the plan page becomes a curated shelf or an open marketplace. The firms that get this right will have a defined list of annuity structures they are willing to place inside the plan, with a rationale for each; the firms that get it wrong will discover the default after the client has already signed the plan.

The largest risk in the update is that the advisor never realizes the shelf has been built. MoneyGuide's annuity modeling inside the portfolio projection is a product governance event disguised as a software release. The planning tool now contains a purchase path, and the advisor's first annuity shelf is wherever that path leads by default. The advisor who does not curate what goes into the model will find the software's default list doing the curating—a strategy failure with the client's income floor at stake, rather than a technology convenience.

The right response is to treat the update as a compliance meeting with the plan page: before the next client opens a plan, the advisor should decide which annuity carriers and which guarantee structures belong in the projection, which ones are acceptable but secondary, and which ones will never appear. That list is the advisor's income floor policy, and it should be written down. Then the software can be used for what it is now: an execution tool for the policy, not the author of it.

The income floor has always been the most consequential decision in decumulation, and MoneyGuide just moved that decision onto the plan page. The advisor who prepares for that page is the one who will own the income conversation; the advisor who doesn't will be taking product orders from a projection line.