Goal Setting

Vanguard and Wealthfront both offer goal planning and tracking, but Wealthfront
has a clear edge.

Wealthfront’s planning tools are excellent. The dashboard displays your assets

and liabilities, giving you a quick look at the likelihood of attaining your goals. The
company connects to Redfin to help prospective homeowners determine how
much a school will cost in their desired neighborhood. College savings scenarios
have cost estimates for numerous U.S.-based universities, and expense
projections include not just tuition, but room and board as well as other costs.
You even determine how long you could take a sabbatical from work and travel
while still making other goals work. There’s a wedding planning goal, and a
database that tells you how much your ideal car will cost.

At Vanguard Personal Advisor Services, the site provides ample goal planning
resources that include checklists, how-to articles, and calculators. Clients can
apply these tools to estimate their total costs of retirement, perform a top-down
review of assets, and plan major life goals that include college savings, home
ownership, or a rainy day fund. Long-term forecasts and recommendations in the
account interface coach clients on how to better meet investing objectives based
on life situations and goals outlined during the lengthy onboarding process. The
client can make changes at any time by altering the risk profile.

Retirement Planning
Both Wealthfront and Vanguard Personal Advisor Services offer a few options for
retirement accounts, including traditional and Roth IRAs, SEP IRAs, and 401(k)
rollovers.

At Wealthfront, the robo-advisor uses your information to estimate your net

worth at retirement and what you could comfortably spend per month during your
golden years. Their Path planning tool helps you compare your projected
retirement income against your current spending habits so you’ll be able to see
whether you can maintain your lifestyle later. You can change various inputs
such as retirement age, savings, target retirement spending and life expectancy
to see how they affect the outcome.

Vanguard’s website features an impressive variety of tools and calculators to

help clients figure out how much money needs to be set aside to reach goals
(such as retirement) within realistic time frames.

Account Types
Wealthfront and Vanguard Personal Advisor Services offer a similar mix of
taxable and retirement accounts. Here again, however, Wealthfront has a wider
offering, with 529 college savings plan accounts being a key difference. At this
time, neither Vanguard nor Wealthfront offer custodial accounts known as
Uniform Gift to Minors Act (UGMA) or Uniform Transfer to Minors Act (UTMA)
accounts.

Wealthfront account types:

 Taxable accounts (individual, joint, and trust)

 Traditional IRA accounts
 Roth IRA accounts
 SEP IRA accounts (for the self-employed and small businesses)
 IRA transfers
 401(k) rollovers
 529 college savings plan accounts
 High-interest cash accounts (individual, joint, trust)

Vanguard Personal Advisory Services account types:

 Taxable accounts (individual, joint, and trust)

 Traditional IRA accounts
 Roth IRA accounts
 SEP IRA accounts (for the self-employed and small businesses)
 IRA transfers
 401(k) rollovers