PeakWorth™ vs a Robo-Advisor (Betterment / Wealthfront) — Auto-Investing vs an Actual Plan

What a robo-advisor genuinely does well

Betterment and Wealthfront solved a real problem: most people shouldn't hand-pick funds or rebalance by hand. For ~0.25%/yr they auto-build a diversified, low-cost index portfolio, rebalance it, reinvest dividends, and run tax-loss harvesting in taxable accounts. If your question is 'who should manage the money,' a robo-advisor is a great at that for a fraction of a 1% human-advisor fee.

For a hands-off investor who just wants money invested sensibly and left alone, that's a legitimately good deal — and far cheaper than the traditional AUM advisor model.

The gap: a robo manages the portfolio, it doesn't make a plan

Auto-investing answers 'how should the money be invested.' It does not answer the questions a plan exists to answer: What year can I actually retire? Does buying this house push it back? Can we afford a kid and still hit FI by 50? What happens to my timeline in a 40% crash or a layoff? Betterment's and Wealthfront's built-in 'retirement' tools mostly return a success-probability dial for age 65 — not a dated, decision-ready answer.

• No dated FI Age — robos return a probability, not the calendar year work becomes optional
• No buy-vs-rent, bonus-allocation, or debt-payoff decision modeling
• Limited dual-income household modeling (separate incomes, accounts, and goals)
• Quarterly-ish framing, not an instant re-run the day a real decision comes up
• The 0.25% fee still scales with your balance, even though the planning work doesn't

When using both makes sense

These are complementary, not competing. The stack most of our users land on: keep your assets at a robo advisor like Betterment or Wealthfront for the auto-management piece, and use both that and PeakWorth together — PeakWorth as the always-on plan that turns the balance the robo grows into a dated FI Age. You get cheap automated investing AND a real projection, instead of paying a 1% human advisor for both.

How PeakWorth turns a robo-advisor balance into a dated FI Age

A robo-advisor's dashboard tells you what you own and a rough 'on track / off track' read for 65. PeakWorth takes that same balance — plus your income, savings rate, and goals — and runs a year-by-year deterministic projection to age 95, with federal + state taxes, account-ordering, employer match, Social Security, and inflation.

The output isn't a probability dial; it's your FI Age — the specific calendar year your portfolio reaches ~25× the expenses it must cover after Social Security — roughly 20× your total annual expenses. You see the dated year work becomes optional and exactly how each decision moves it, while your robo keeps quietly managing the money in the background.