Retirement Explorer

Wondering how much money you'll need to retire? How about how long you can live on what you have now? So many questions! There are four main variables that affect your retirement income from your investments:

Basic Assumptions

* Wealth: Net worth at time of retirement. Not added to after retirement.

* Interest: Per year (not including compounding), after inflation, paid continuously.

* Expenses: The fixed amount you draw out each month, paid continuously.

* Length: Years of retirement.

With this little app you can easily explore "what if" scenarios involving these variables.

Instructions:

The selected row is the variable the applet is solving for. By default the "Expenses" variable is selected. This means that you can see how much you can draw each month depending on the values you enter for the other three. For example, if you expect a 25 year retirement and expect to earn 5%, you can input those values and then adjust the "Wealth" slider to see how much money you will be able to live on each month depending on your net wealth at retirement.

You can select the "Wealth" row in order to see how much you'll need to save in order to retire with a particular desired monthly disbursement. You can solve for "Interest" to see what sort of interest rate you'll to meet your goals, and you can solve for "Length" to see how many years your savings will last given the other parameters. Play with the app for a while and you should get the idea of how to answer many other interesting "what if" scenarios.

You can even use the app for purposes other than just retirement. For instance, if you are an officer in a start-up or own a small business and are considering whether to take out a big loan or a round of venture capital funding, you can calculate how long of a runway it will provide, or how much you can spend each month with a runway of a given length.

WARNING: I MAKE NO WARRANTIES AS TO THE UTILITY OR ACCURACY OF THIS APP. IT IS JUST A TOOL FOR GETTING A ROUGH IDEA OF POSSIBLE RETIREMENT SCENARIOS, AND IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR EXPERT ADVICE FROM RETIREMENT PROFESSIONALS.