Motley Fool Rule Your Retirement Review 2022

People are retiring earlier and living longer. Or at least they want to. The horizon of your post-retirement life can stretch for 50 years or more, eclipsing your working years. Most people will not be able to rely on pensions and social security to cover their post-retirement expenses.

How can you make sure that you will be financially comfortable for the duration of your golden years?

Motley Fool endeavors to answer this question with its Rule Your Retirement subscription service. It has a database of premium articles to help you build your portfolio to maximize your retirement savings.

But at $149 per year, is it worth it? After all, you could hand over your hard-earned money to a robo-advisor and invest in an algorithm-optimized, tax-advantaged portfolio with no management fees. Do you really need retirement planning advice on top of that?

If you don’t know much about retirement, the answer might be yes. Read on to find out if Rule Your Retirement is for you.

What is Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement?

You’ve probably come across Motley Fool’s financial articles on the web, and maybe you are even a subscriber to one of their services like Stock Advisor or Rule Breakers. Since 1993, Motley Fool has provided a host of investment research services on different topics related to investing. You can read more about Motley Fool in our review.

Especially for the price, their research offerings are pretty good, but the challenge is figuring out which of their products suits your needs and situation. If you aren’t into investing in individual stocks, for instance, you don’t want to purchase products like Stock Advisor or Rule Breakers, which feature growth stock recommendations.

Rule Your Retirement might be the one subscription theoretically suitable for almost anyone who is not themselves a CFP or already receiving professional retirement advice.

It also has the lowest price of all the Motley Fool subscriptions and probably contains the soundest, long-term financial advice available on the platform. Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement is appropriate for investors both before and after retirement.

How Much is Rule Your Retirement?

To get access to its wealth of information on retirement and financial planning topics, you’ll pay $149 per year. If you click here, you can get access to Motley Fool’s current promotion, which offers one year of Rule Your Retirement for $99 and two years for $149.

The Service

The main products of your subscription are articles on a range of personal finance issues, including retirement. You’ll learn not only how to use social security, Medicare, and tax-advantaged accounts but also how to pay down debt and buy a house.

You’ll get access to a Rule Your Retirement web portal, broken down into the following sections:

• Build Your Own Portfolio
• How to Retire
• Are You Saving Enough to Retire?
• IRAs, 401(k)s, and Roths
• Everyday Finances
• Health and Wellness
• Property and Mortgages
• Estate Planning
• Insurance
• Paying for College

These topics are varied, and not all of them directly have to do with retirement. You can find guides and articles on everything from healthcare savings accounts to the best tools for tracking your spending and educational resources on any investment topic you can imagine.

Model Portfolios

You’ll also get access to model portfolios for your retirement savings accounts, like your IRAs and 401(k)s. The portfolio is broken down into Large Cap, Mid-Caps, and Small Cap index funds, as well as international stocks, real estate, and bonds. The model portfolio will also give you target allocations for each sector and suggest percentages to allocate to each individual fund according to your retirement horizon.

You can use these portfolio allocations to build your M1 Finance Pies or develop your portfolio through any other platform.

Premium Live Content

By signing up for Rule Your Retirement, Motley Fool will give you access to its live shows, which run Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm EST. These are decent presentations with independent analysts discussing various investment-related topics from mutual funds to semiconductors to biotechnology stocks.

Sometimes these shows post free analysis and even investment tools in the “Slido” on the right side of the page. If you don’t have time to watch these shows, you can also stream audio only in the background from any web-connected device.

Other Motley Fool Subscriptions

Motley Fool has a ton of different subscriptions that serve other purposes, but its two most established and well-known are Stock Advisor and Rule Breakers, which you can read about in our linked reviews.

A third service, Everlasting Stocks, purports to help you choose stocks that you can “buy today and hold forever.”

If you are looking for monthly stock picks, Rule Your Retirement won’t give you that, so you can consider choosing one of the stock recommendation services listed above. Rule Your Retirement does periodically update the target allocations in its retirement portfolios, but these are not individual stock picks, and the updates are on an as-needed basis.

Why Choose Rule Your Retirement?

No matter what phase of life you find yourself in, retirement should be part of your routine financial planning. Even if it means setting aside only $50 per month, plenty of platforms allow even the most minor investors to access index funds, retirement accounts, and other investment vehicles to grow your wealth and lower taxes.

One could argue that it’s even more critical for average earners to maximize these tools than for the ultra-rich.

Even if you do have managed accounts and access to a CFP, you should develop a good understanding of the key financial issues involved in retirement and managing your everyday finances. Many of us find the topic terrifying—after all, what person in their mid-thirties wants to think about retiring? What if we find out we’re way behind the curve when it comes to our savings?The obvious answer is that you can make course corrections at any time to proactively improve your financial situation. And having access to regularly updated and vetted financial planning advice and educational resources is crucial to getting your finances on track. If you do not have this through other means, you should consider Rule Your Retirement.

You May Not Benefit from Rule Your Retirement if…

If you already have a firm retirement plan that includes access to financial planning articles and resources, you may not get much value from Rule Your Retirement. Also, if you aren’t saving for retirement or planning to anytime soon, you aren’t yet ready for Rule Your Retirement, though you may want to consider it for its other financial resources.

For the wealthy, if you are hands-off with your investments and trust your tax advisors and accountants to handle your retirement planning, you might not find use in Rule Your Retirement.

Pros and Cons of Motley Fool Rule Your Retirement

Here are the pros and cons of Rule Your Retirement:

Pros

• Sound Financial and Investment Advice – Rule Your Retirement isn’t going to ask you to do something risky, like throw money at the latest tech stock. Instead, you’ll get sound, time-proven advice supported by evidence.
• Reasonable Price – Even if you make up your mind to sign up for only one year at $99 if Rule Your Retirement helps you learn what you need to get your retirement on track, it will be an investment with a thousandfold return.
• Variety of Topics – Rule Your Retirement contains the educational resources for holistic financial planning, not just topics directly pertaining to retirement. These can help get your money in shape no matter where you are in your life. They usually post 1-2 new articles per week, curated or written by Robert Brokamp himself and his small team of writers.

Cons

• No Access to Stock Recommendations – Don’t come to Rule Your Retirement looking for individual stock recommendations—Motley Fool’s bread and butter—because you won’t find any. You will have to sign up for another subscription to get that. You will, however, get access to resources to sufficiently diversify your investments according to modern portfolio theory.
• Frequent Marketing Emails – Once you sign up for a Motley Fool Product—any Motley Fool product—you will get marketing emails for other Motley Fool services. While emails asking you to buy another Motley Fool product can be a turn-off, you can opt-out of these in “Account Settings.”

Motley Fool Rule Your Retirement: The Bottom Line

Rule Your Retirement has a proverbial wealth of resources when it comes to good information and education about retirement and financial planning.

Here are some investors who will benefit most from buying the Rule Your Retirement subscription:

• Investors who don’t have a financial planner
• Investors who want to plan for children’s educational expenses
• Investors who want help planning for retirement
• Investors who wish to take the reins of their financial destiny
• Investors who need assistance with estate planning
• Retirees who need information on life, health, and long-term care insurance
• Investors of all levels, beginner to experienced
• Anyone who ever plans to retire

Rule Your Retirement is an excellent holistic resource for financial and retirement planning. Their advice is well-sourced, sensible, and clearly explained. Good Credit Info found no factual discrepancies or questionable advice in any Rule Your Retirement articles.

Opting into the two-year package means that you will get Rule Your Retirement for less than $75 for each of those two years, a good deal. If you aren’t sure about subscribing for that long, you can sign up for the one-year package at $99. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, and Motley Fool will refund you the total amount if you cancel during this trial period.

To get the promotional price of $99 for one year or $149 for two years, you can take advantage of this link to sign up for Rule Your Retirement.