Retirement Lifestyle Calculator
How much will you need to save to support your lifestyle in retirement?
This calculator can help you estimate how much you would need to accumulate by your retirement age to fund 25 years of the retirement lifestyle you want.
How We Calculate This
Our calculator estimates how big your nest egg has to be in order to support the kind of lifestyle you want in retirement for 25 years.
The answer depends on the variables you supply – your desired spending level, investment performance, and income tax rate at retirement. It uses an annual rate of inflation of 4%, which you can change.
How to Use This Calculator
You can adjust any of the settings to better reflect your situation or test different assumptions.
Years to retirement:
Enter the number of years from now till when you expect to retire.
What you want to spend every year in retirement:
Enter how much money would you need your retirement savings to provide annually in order to support your lifestyle in today’s dollars.
This is called your “annual spending target,” and the calculator adjusts this for expected inflation between now and your retirement. The calculator continues to adjust the amount needed as you move through your retirement years.
What you think your investments will earn:
Even once you retire, your retirement savings should remain invested to earn a return. This is known as your “annual return assumption.
The default return assumption is an estimate for a stock/bond mix based on historical returns and recent bond yields. You can enter a different return assumption if you like; but keep in mind that the higher the return assumption you enter, the more risk there will be that the returns generated by your retirement savings will fall short of your expectation.
What you think your income tax rate at retirement will be:
It’s impossible to know what tax rates will be in the future, so you may just want to use your current tax bracket as the basis for this assumption.
Annual inflation-rate assumption:
The default assumption of 4 percent is based on the average annual inflation rate over the past 50 years. You can change this assumption if you have a different inflation expectation.
What the Retirement Lifestyle Results Tell You
How much you’ll need to retire:
This is a calculation of how much money you would need at retirement age to generate enough annual pretax income to support your spending target over a 25-year retirement span.
Your annual spending target at retirement age:
The number generated here takes your annual spending target in today’s dollars and adjusts that to the amount it would represent by the time you retire.
Pretax income needed at retirement age:
This is a calculation of how much pretax income you would need at retirement age to generate enough after-tax income to meet your annual spending target.
How Much Money do You Need to Retire?
It’s a big task to prepare for retirement, but one thing you can’t afford to do is to put it off – another is to base your retirement savings assumptions on the wrong approach.
Some calculators suggest rules of thumb that base your retirement income on a percentage of your working income. But that approach is flawed.
Instead, you should decide how you want to live in retirement and determine what it will cost to support that lifestyle. See what that looks like, and then start to plan.
>>Retirement Savings: How Much You Should Have at 25, 30, 40, 50 and 65
Remember that your expenses could change in retirement too, so you’ll need to refine and adjust your plan and assumptions all along the way.
How to Get There
A lot goes into preparing for retirement, so it’s important to understand and map out the process.
Read our Retirement Planning Guide to learn how to plan, how to make the most of your money at every point, and how to make effective decisions along the way.