Retirement planning without linking your accounts

Aggregation can keep balances and transactions current with little repeated effort. That is valuable for budgeting, cash-flow tracking, and dashboards where daily or weekly changes are the product, and modern connections may use institution-hosted authorization rather than asking an app to handle credentials directly.

It also adds another relationship to manage. Institution coverage varies, connections can require renewed authorization, and the app receives a continuing data feed until access is changed or revoked. Those are trade-offs, not reasons to assume aggregation is unsafe or inappropriate.

Retirement modeling usually starts with slower-moving facts: account type and owner, balance, holdings or asset allocation, taxable cost basis where known, contributions, pensions, annuities, income, spending, and the dates attached to those figures. It does not need a live stream of every card purchase to run a long-horizon projection.

That makes periodic capture workable. A screen can supply a current balance and holdings; a brokerage or retirement-plan statement PDF can supply the same facts across multiple pages; pension and annuity statements can propose structured income details. Manual entry should remain available when a document is unclear or when you prefer not to upload it.

RetireGlide processes private screenshots and statement PDFs to propose structured plan facts. You review the proposed balances, account types, holdings, and income details against the source before anything enters the plan; source files are deleted after you confirm the results, or automatically within 30 days.

That confirmation step is essential because document extraction can be wrong. The durable planning record is the structured information you approved, while the source image or PDF has a limited role in extraction and review.

• Freshness — aggregation can update automatically; screenshots, statements, and manual balances update when you choose to refresh them.
• Setup and maintenance — capture takes a few minutes per institution at refresh time; aggregation may be quicker initially but can occasionally require reconnection.
• Coverage — documents and manual entry can cover accounts, pensions, or small recordkeepers that a particular aggregator does not support; aggregation coverage continues to improve.
• Data scope — periodic capture shares selected planning documents; aggregation can provide broader, ongoing account data that enables transaction-level features.
• Control — capture provides a visible review and deletion lifecycle; aggregation provides convenience plus authorization and revocation controls that depend on the institutions and provider involved.

AI may interpret a screenshot or statement PDF and propose structured inputs, but it does not calculate the retirement result. After confirmation, RetireGlide's deterministic, versioned engine performs every projection, tax calculation, Monte Carlo trial, and safe-spending calculation; assumptions remain reviewable, and forecasts are educational estimates rather than guarantees.