RETIREMENT
This retirement calculator brings your whole retirement plan into one view: what you could have saved by retirement, what that needs to be to fund your spending, and whether you are on track or short. Enter your numbers below and press Calculate to see, in plain figures, how your plan adds up and what monthly saving would close any gap.
Retirement calculator
This projection uses one steady assumed return before and during retirement, ignores inflation and tax, and is a planning guide, not a promise. Real returns will vary from year to year, and results are estimates for educational purposes only and are not financial advice.
Say you are 40, plan to retire at 67, and have $60,000 saved so far. You are not adding anything each month at the moment. You expect a 7% annual return, you want to spend $6,500 a month in retirement, you expect $1,800 a month from Social Security, and you want the fund to last 25 years.
Your $60,000 grows on its own to a projected $394,987.22 by age 67. The amount needed at retirement is much bigger: $664,988.45. Social Security covers $1,800 of the $6,500, so your savings only have to fund the other $4,700 a month, but over 25 years that still adds up to a large pot.
That leaves you short by $270,001.23. The monthly saving needed to be fully on track comes to $282.10. In other words, saving about $282 a month from now on would close the whole gap by 67 on these assumptions. Run the same plan with a retirement age of 65 or 70 and you will see how strongly two years either way moves the answer.
Investor.gov, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s education site, offers free investing guides and tools.
Your retirement plan has two halves. The first half is building the fund: your current savings grow, and your monthly contributions are added, month by month, until you reach retirement age. The second half is drawing from the fund: the calculator works out how large the fund needs to be at retirement to pay a steady monthly amount for the whole of your retirement.
Social Security reduces what the fund itself must provide, which is why it is an input. If you want to spend $5,000 a month and Social Security pays $1,800, your savings only need to cover the other $3,200, so the amount you need at retirement is much smaller than the full cost of your spending.
Try changing one number at a time and watch the result. Small changes in the monthly contribution or the retirement age usually move the result more than small changes in the expected return, because time and contributions are the parts of the plan you actually control, while returns are only an assumption.
A common guide is about 25 times your yearly spending for a 30-year retirement, the idea behind the 4% rule. Your own figure depends on your Social Security, your spending and how long retirement lasts, which is why this calculator works it out from your numbers rather than a rule of thumb.
The 4% rule means withdrawing about 4% of the fund in the first year of retirement, then adjusting that amount for inflation each year. On historical figures for a balanced portfolio, that pace has usually lasted about 30 years, but it is a guide, not a guarantee.
As early as possible. Because of compound growth, money saved in the first decade of a plan has the longest time to grow, so those early contributions do a large share of the final work, and starting later usually means saving much more each month to catch up.
No. This calculator uses one assumed return and ignores inflation and tax, so treat the numbers as planning estimates in present-day money, not predictions. Inflation will raise future spending and tax will reduce what you keep, so revisit the plan as both become clearer.