ZBee vs MaxiFi Planner
Last reviewed: August 2026
MaxiFi is the economist's retirement planner — built on Laurence Kotlikoff's consumption-smoothing research, it computes the living standard your lifetime resources can support and then recommends moves (Social Security claiming, Roth conversions) to raise it. ZBee is a narrower, more private instrument: a native Mac app that measures the most you can safely spend from the accounts you actually hold, without recommending anything and without your data ever touching a server. They are more different in philosophy than any two tools on our comparison pages.
The one-line version: MaxiFi tells you how to maximize your plan in their cloud; ZBee measures what your current plan supports, on your own Mac.
| ZBee | MaxiFi Planner | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On your Mac — by design, not policy | Their cloud |
| Platform | Native Mac app | Web |
| Uses your real accounts | Yes — read-only link brings in every position with live prices, direct to your Mac | Hand-entered — no linked-account import published |
| Core question | Most you can safely spend from what you hold today | Highest lifetime living standard your resources support |
| Stance | Measures — no recommendations, by design | Optimizes — recommends claiming ages, conversions, spending path |
| Would it have survived real market history? |
Yes — automatically: your number is replayed through every real market sequence since 1928 and reported as "survived N of M" | Monte Carlo only ("Living Standard Monte Carlo," Premium tiers) — no historical replay |
| Yearly spending guidance in retirement |
Yes — this year's trigger points in dollars, from published Guyton-Klinger rules you can verify by hand | A recommended annual spending path from the smoothing model |
| Year-by-year tax detail | Yes — federal, state, IRMAA, NIIT, RMDs, shown and auditable | Yes — federal, state, and FICA modeled |
| Social Security / Roth optimizers |
No — by design (see below) | Yes — both are headline features |
| Price / year | $99 | $109–$359 by tier (Monte Carlo starts at $149) |
MaxiFi's prices and features as published on maxifi.com, August 2026; they change — check MaxiFi for current details. ZBee isn't affiliated with MaxiFi or Economic Security Planning, Inc.
Where MaxiFi does more
Being straight about this: MaxiFi models your whole lifetime, not just the decumulation years — earnings, FICA, saving before retirement, and the living standard all of it supports, on a serious economic foundation. If you want software to tell you what to do — when to claim Social Security, whether a Roth conversion raises your lifetime spending power — MaxiFi is built for exactly that, its tax engine is real, and Kotlikoff's consumption-smoothing framing is genuinely distinctive. For a working household still shaping its plan, that lifetime view is a fine reason to pick it.
Where ZBee is different
Three differences do most of the work. First, what the plan is built from: MaxiFi's inputs are hand-entered; ZBee links your brokerage read-only and pulls every actual position with live prices, so the projection rests on what you own, not on a typed approximation of it. Second, where your data lives: MaxiFi is a cloud service; ZBee's whole model runs on your Mac and your financial life never leaves it. Third, the stance: MaxiFi's product is its recommendations. ZBee deliberately makes none — it measures what your current situation supports, stress-tests that number against every real market sequence since 1928 as well as a thousand simulated futures, and shows you the year-by-year math. Optimizing claiming ages and conversion schedules is strategy territory that depends on things software can't know — and that a CPA or CFP is licensed to advise on. The full comparison covers this line-drawing in detail.
Which should you choose?
Choose MaxiFi if you want a lifetime plan with concrete recommendations —
claiming ages, conversion schedules, a smoothed spending path — and you're comfortable
hand-entering your finances into a vendor's cloud.
Choose ZBee if the question you actually have is "how much can I safely
spend?", you want it measured from your real holdings rather than typed estimates, and you
want your financial data kept on your own machine. The free demo mode runs on
sample data with no account — a fair place to see the difference in stance for yourself.
See pricing · The full comparison · ZBee vs Boldin · ZBee vs ProjectionLab · ZBee vs FIRECalc · Read the methodology