№ 001 — № 005 · new issues as cases close

The Ledger.

A serial record of head-to-head case work. Same household, same inputs — a panel of specialists against the tool the case came from. The findings, the dollar amounts, the citations, and the rejected alternatives, on the record. The comparisons are public; the Ledger is where they file.

  1. № 001

    Case run 2026-05-11 · Wealth vertical

    Wealth v. IncomeLab

    The Smiths — decumulation comparison

    The case

    A retired Florida couple, 65 and 62 — $2.75M across a joint taxable account, an IRA, and a 401(k), a single-life pension with no survivor benefit, a rental, and a $200,000 legacy goal. The household IncomeLab put in its own published sample.

    The collision

    Roth conversions, Medicare surcharges, and an insurance premium all pulled on the same dollars. Cross the $218,000 MAGI threshold by one dollar and Medicare adds $974 a year in surcharges per spouse, with a two-year lookback. The GUL premium that replaces the lost pension survivor income crowds out ~$7,500 of bridge-year conversion capacity per year of overlap. Two specialists proposed the same survivor fix with different policy parameters; the panel flagged the duplicate instead of shipping it twice.

    What the panel preserved

    • 9 recommendations
    • 10 conflicts caught
    • 5 calendar triggers
    • 49 alternatives considered

    Nine sequenced recommendations and the dissent that shaped them — ten cross-domain conflicts on the record, five calendar windows dated, forty-nine alternatives ruled out with the reason attached to each.

    What a single tool said

    A 32-page projection: one tax-distribution strategy compared against a baseline, quantified at $129,726 over 32 years, with Medicare modeled as a constant $228 a month across the full horizon. No conflict section. No rejected-alternatives section.

  2. № 002

    Case run 2026-05-12 · Tax vertical

    Tax v. Holistiplan

    Accumulator / Professor / Retiree — three personas

    The case

    Holistiplan's own three sample personas — a mid-30s accumulator couple with a Schedule C, a 50-year-old professor household near the top of the 22% bracket, and a 72-year-old retired couple at $0 total tax with $68K of Social Security.

    The collision

    For the retiree, a Roth conversion looked like a 10/12% decision. It wasn't: each converted dollar makes ~85 cents more Social Security taxable, then pushes capital gains out of the 0% band into 15% — an effective marginal cost of 27–42%. The return reader reports the 10% bracket and the QCD eligibility as two separate observations; reconciling them into one marginal-cost number is what the panel's synthesis pass did.

    What the panel preserved

    • 22 recommendations across 3 personas
    • 55 cross-domain conflicts
    • 8 calendar triggers
    • 105 alternatives considered

    Twenty-two recommendations that differ by demographic — not a template — plus fifty-five conflicts, eight dated windows, and one hundred five alternatives rejected with reasoning across the three runs.

    What a single tool said

    The same templated report for all three personas: key figures, MAGI table, bracket chart, an observation list of ~10–15 items. “You are in the 22% marginal bracket. Depending on your age and income projections, you might consider a Roth conversion.”

    Read № 002 in full →

    Holistiplan 2025 Tax Report sample set — Accumulator / Professor / Retiree personas, distributed by Holistiplan as marketing material

  3. № 003

    Case run 2026-05-12 · Estate & Trust vertical

    Estate & Trust v. Vanilla

    Leonard Family — taxable-estate comparison

    The case

    The Leonard family, both 64 — a $12.78M Washington estate, four LLCs at $3.2M aggregate, an $8.5M ILIT untouched since 2009, a $2M foundation commitment, and $1.04M of projected state estate tax at the second death.

    The collision

    Four strategies — a $2M donor-advised fund, a $1–2M CRUT, a $1M CLAT, and ILIT premium remediation — demanded $4–5M of liquid and LLC capacity in the same year. Mechanically infeasible. The panel sequenced the four, and the do-nothing alternative was documented and dismissed on each conflict it touched.

    What the panel preserved

    • 7 recommendations
    • 19 conflicts caught
    • 3 calendar triggers
    • 23 alternatives considered

    Seven personalized strategies for this specific family, nineteen conflicts on the record, three dated windows — including the §2035 three-year ILIT lookback — and twenty-three alternatives ruled out with reasons.

    What a single tool said

    A visual estate map with four “Opportunities” bullets: review beneficiary designations, review trust funding, anticipate tax-law changes — plus a noted document typo. The advanced-strategy pages are reference content; the same text appears in any report.

    Read № 003 in full →

    Vanilla “Leonard Family Sample Report — Taxable Estate” variant dated 01/08/2025, distributed by Just Vanilla, Inc.

  4. № 004

    Case run 2026-05-12 · Wealth vertical

    Wealth v. eMoney

    Rattigan / Price / Stein — three households incl. Decision Center

    The case

    Three published eMoney plans spanning the range — a mid-50s dual-earner family with no estate documents, a retired couple whose plan reads 170% funded, and a $20.78M household with $6.88M of concentrated company stock behind a Decision Center A/B sample.

    The collision

    Two of the panel's own specialists recommended hybrid long-term-care coverage for the Price household — with different benefit pools ($240K per spouse vs. $480K total) and different premium structures. The panel preserved both dimensions: the agreement that the underwriting window is closing at 67/66, and the disagreement on size, so the advisor calibrates once instead of missing either.

    What the panel preserved

    • 36 recommendations across 3 households
    • 47 cross-domain conflicts
    • 10 calendar triggers
    • 161 alternatives considered

    Thirty-six recommendations, forty-seven conflicts, ten dated windows, and one hundred sixty-one rejected alternatives across the three runs — including reverse-ordering rejections, like a GRAT that cannot name a dynasty trust that does not yet exist.

    What a single tool said

    A 19–64 page projection PDF per household — cash flow, Monte Carlo, percent-funded bars. Decision Center sets one advisor-defined scenario beside Base Facts, and the advisor narrates the divergence.

    Read № 004 in full →

    eMoney Advisor published sample reports — Sample Client plan (Washington Crossing), Paul & Lynn Price plan (Tranel Financial), Jerry & Ruth Stein Decision Center sample (Wells Fargo Advisors)

  5. № 005

    Case run 2026-05-12 · Wealth vertical

    Wealth v. MoneyGuidePro

    Sample / Sample 2021 / Smith — three households

    The case

    Three sample households from MoneyGuidePro's published plans — a $285K peak-earning New Jersey couple with a college horizon, a severely under-saved New York couple with a $950K co-op, and a $165K Virginia family with zero estate documents.

    The collision

    The NYC apartment was claimed four ways at once: the anchor for the Section 121 exclusion, a candidate for LLC contribution, the funding asset for the revocable trust, and the trigger for a state-domicile change. Each strategy assumed a different disposition of the same property. The panel reconciled the four into a single timeline instead of leaving the advisor to discover the collision mid-execution.

    What the panel preserved

    • 42 recommendations across 3 households
    • 49 cross-domain conflicts
    • 7 calendar triggers
    • 156 alternatives considered

    Forty-two recommendations, forty-nine conflicts, seven dated windows, and one hundred fifty-six rejected alternatives across the three runs — the path-not-taken reasoning on the record, not in someone's head.

    What a single tool said

    A 50–90-page goal-funding plan. “Delay retirement to age 67. Probability of Success rises from 41% to 78%.” Trade-offs live in Play Zone sliders the advisor drives; the paths not taken are narrated, not recorded.

    Read № 005 in full →

    MoneyGuidePro published sample reports — three household plan PDFs distributed by Envestnet | MoneyGuide

Issues enter the Ledger from two dockets: a competitor’s own published sample report, or anonymized case work from Rivalta’s own runs. There is no schedule — an issue publishes when a case closes. The issues in the archive so far all come from the first docket, and each follows the same protocol.

We take the competitor’s own published sample report — the one they put on their marketing site to show what their product produces. We extract the household’s parameters: ages, account balances, asset locations, family structure, business or property holdings. We feed those parameters into Rivalta as a synthetic household. We run a single vertical pass on the same inputs.

What you read in an issue is what each system produced on the same household, on the same inputs, with the same assumptions about goals and constraints. The competitor’s side shows their report’s findings, reproduced or paraphrased with their language preserved where possible. The Rivalta side shows the single vertical pass output: cross-domain conflicts, dollar quantifications, statutory citations, sequenced recommendations, and the rejected-alternatives section.

The synthetic households are synthetic by design. They are not anonymized real clients — they are constructed to match the published sample exactly. This eliminates two things: any claim that the comparison was rigged by picking a favorable household, and any client-confidentiality exposure for the validation cohort. The household in each issue is the household the competitor chose to put on their own marketing site.

The architecture that makes this possible — the anonymization layer that lets Rivalta reason against household-level detail without identifying any real household — is one of the eleven patent-pending claims. It is also the reason no competitor publishes comparisons. Their architecture cannot show what their engine produced without identifying the household it was produced for. Rivalta’s can.

If we find an error in a published issue — a misread of a competitor’s report, a miscalculation in our own, a missed citation — we correct it visibly, with the correction dated and the prior version archived. We do not silently update. The Ledger is public, and the corrections are part of what’s public.