Retirement Calculator

Retirement planning comes down to one comparison: the balance you will have when you stop working, against the income you will need after you stop. This calculator projects the first from your current savings, your monthly contribution, your expected return and the years remaining, then converts the result into a rough monthly income using the 4% withdrawal guideline.

The projection compounds two things at once. Your existing balance grows on its own, and every contribution grows from the month it is made. Because the earliest contributions have the longest to compound, the schedule matters as much as the amount: a 30-year-old contributing $500 a month usually ends up ahead of a 45-year-old contributing twice that for half as long.

The 4% rule is a planning heuristic drawn from historical US market data. It suggests that withdrawing about 4% of a portfolio in the first year and adjusting for inflation thereafter has historically survived a 30-year retirement in most periods. It is not a guarantee, and a long retirement, an expensive early decade, or low future returns can all make a lower rate safer.

Real projections face two forces this model does not include: inflation, which raises the income you will need, and the sequence of returns, which means the order of good and bad years can matter as much as the average. Use this as a starting point, then check the result against a target of around 10 to 12 times your final salary, and adjust the contribution rather than the return assumption if the gap is large.

This retirement calculator is an educational projection assuming a constant return and a fixed contribution. It ignores fees, taxes, Social Security and the sequence of market returns. Consult a licensed financial planner about your own situation.