Why You Need to Stress Test Your Financial Plan And How Success Score Helps

In a perfect world, your investments would grow at a steady rate, inflation would remain low and predictable, and your retirement plan would unfold exactly as expected.

But we don't live in that world, we live in the real world! And in the real world, markets are volatile, inflation fluctuates, and unexpected life events are part of the deal.

That's why stress testing your financial plan is more important than ever.

What Is Stress Testing?

Stress testing is the process of simulating your financial plan under different real-world scenarios, both good and bad, to see how it holds up. Instead of relying on a single set of assumptions (like a fixed 5% growth rate and 2% inflation), you ask bigger questions:

• What if the market underperforms for 5–10 years?
• What if inflation spikes?
• What if we enter a recession right after I retire?
• What happens if I live longer than expected or have higher healthcare costs?

Stress testing lets you see how these "what ifs" affect your retirement timeline, spending power, and estate goals before they become real problems.

Enter: Optiml's Success Score

At Optiml, we just launched a powerful new feature called Success Score to make stress testing easier, smarter, and more realistic than ever.

Instead of running one plan at a time, you can now run up to 50 unique market scenarios at once, based on your actual asset allocation and spending plan. Each simulation uses decades of real historical market and inflation data, not just averages or made-up numbers.

What you get is a score that tells you how often your plan holds up under varying conditions, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

What Makes It Different?

Other tools might show you one best-case or worst-case result. With Success Score, you get a full range of outcomes based on:

• Realistic investment growth rates from 1,000+ historical simulations
• Inflation models based on 40+ years of Canadian CPI data
• Recession simulation (you can pick timing, duration, and severity)
• Automatic scenario generation with varied asset allocations
• Consistent deposit and withdrawal order to keep results fair and unbiased

This is financial planning that reflects the real Canadian economy, not just textbook theory.

Why It Matters for You

Whether you're trying to retire early, leave behind a large estate, or simply not outlive your savings, stress testing helps you make confident, informed decisions.

With Optiml's Success Score, you can:

• Understand the range of possible futures, not just one.
• See how small changes (like delaying CPP or downsizing later) impact long-term success.
• Build a plan that works not just in good times, but in any time.

Ready to see how your plan holds up?

Try the new Success Score in Optiml, and start testing your plan against real Canadian/US market history.

👉 We also made a short video explaining how it works, watch it here!

Try Optiml Free Today!