Retirement Calculator

Enough capital that its real growth plus a steady drawdown covers your spending for as long as you live. There is no single number, because it depends on what you spend, how long you need it and what the money earns after inflation. For a $40,000-a-year income starting in 30 years, lasting 25 years, at a 5% return and 3% inflation, the answer is about $1.95 million — and roughly half of that figure is inflation, not spending. The popular "25 times your spending" rule of thumb gives $1 million for the same goal, because it quietly assumes you retire today.

Because returns and prices compound against each other rather than side by side. The Fisher relation — the one TreasuryDirect states for inflation-protected securities — is 1 + real = (1 + nominal) ÷ (1 + inflation). At a 7% return and 3% inflation that is 3.883%, not 4%. Because the difference is divided by (1 + inflation), subtraction always exaggerates how far the real return sits from zero: whenever your return beats inflation it overstates the gain and flatters the projection, and when inflation wins it overstates the loss. Over thirty years that missing tenth of a point is tens of thousands of dollars.

Older than you expect to. The Social Security Administration’s period life table puts life expectancy at 65 at about 17.5 more years for men and 20.2 for women — so roughly age 82 or 85. But that is a MEDIAN: half of 65-year-olds outlive it, often by a decade or more. Planning to your life expectancy is a coin flip on running out of money, and the two mistakes are not equally bad. This calculator defaults to 90 for that reason.

Usually not. Most portfolios shift toward bonds as the paycheque stops, because a retiree has no future earnings to recover from a crash with. Using one rate for both phases either overstates what your savings will grow to or overstates what they will sustain. The two rates are separate inputs here for exactly that reason — the defaults are 7% while working and 5% after.

No, and the omissions run in opposite directions. Social Security replaces a meaningful share of pre-retirement income for most people, so the nest egg you actually need is smaller than the figure here — subtract your expected annual benefit from your income goal to see it. Taxes and fees run the other way: withdrawals from a traditional 401(k) or IRA are ordinary income, and a 1% annual fee is a direct subtraction from your return. Enter your return net of fees if you want that included.

This model assumes an identical return every single year. Real markets deliver them in an order, and once you are drawing an income the order matters enormously: a bad first decade of retirement forces you to sell more shares at low prices, and the portfolio can be exhausted even though the AVERAGE return over the period was fine. No single-rate projection can show this. It is the main reason to treat the number above as a target to steer by rather than a forecast, and to hold a cash buffer for the first few years.

It answers a narrower question. The 4% rule asks what you can safely withdraw from a portfolio you already hold, over a roughly 30-year retirement, and was derived from historical U.S. market data. This calculator asks the forward question — what you have to accumulate first — over whatever horizon you choose, and lets you state the return and inflation assumptions explicitly instead of inheriting them. The two agree closely when you set a 30-year retirement and a real return near 4%.