Retirement Savings Calculator
Where you stand
Three fields. Everything below is in today's dollars — no mental math converting future amounts back to what they'd actually buy.
401(k), IRA, and any brokerage money earmarked for retirement
Your contributions plus the employer match — check your last statement
How we calculate this
Two numbers, compared. What you'll have: today's savings grown forward, plus each year's contributions with their own growth. What you'll need: your annual retirement spending divided by a safe withdrawal rate — the same arithmetic behind the 4% rule, which at 4% means 25× your spending.
Everything is in today's dollars, and that's a deliberate choice. Growth uses a real return — 6.9% after inflation, the historical US equity average from NYU Stern — so no figure on this page needs translating back into what it would actually buy. A projection that tells a 38-year-old they'll have $6 million is technically defensible and practically useless.
The consequence people miss: using a real return requires treating your contribution as rising with inflation. If you contribute $19,500 today and hold that number fixed in nominal terms for thirty years while discounting with a real return, you've quietly modeled a contribution that shrinks by a third in purchasing power. We hold contributions constant in today's dollars instead — which means the assumption is that you increase them roughly with your pay. If your contribution is genuinely frozen in dollar terms, this projection is optimistic.
We never estimate your Social Security. The real figure depends on your full 35-year earnings history, and any number we invented would be wrong in a direction we couldn't predict. Get the personalized estimate from your SSA statement at ssa.gov/myaccount and enter it — we subtract it from your annual spending before applying the withdrawal rate. Leaving it at zero is the conservative choice and overstates your gap, often by a lot: $2,400/month of benefits removes $720,000 from a 4%-rule target.
What we don't model: taxes on withdrawals (that depends on your Roth/traditional/brokerage mix), sequence-of-returns risk (the withdrawal rate is itself the buffer for bad early years), a spouse's separate accounts and benefits, and any spending that changes through retirement rather than holding flat.
Real scenarios
Age 38, $145k saved, $19,500/yr: on track with room to spare
Twenty-nine years of 6.9% real growth turns the existing $145,000 into about $1,003,972, and the future contributions into another $1,674,158 — a projected $2,678,129 against a $1,700,000 target for $68,000 of annual spending. That's a surplus near $978,000, and it doesn't count a dollar of Social Security. The lesson isn't "you've won" — it's that a decent balance plus consistent contributions plus time does most of the work, and that this person could reasonably plan to retire earlier or spend more.
Age 45, $60k saved, $8,000/yr: an $852,319 shortfall, and what it means
Twenty-two years brings that to about $647,681 against a $1,500,000 target for $60,000 of spending — short by $852,319. Real, but not the disaster it looks like: this projection includes no Social Security at all, and a typical benefit would cut the target by hundreds of thousands. Add an SSA estimate before drawing conclusions, then look at the contribution, which is the lever with the most room left.
Why the Social Security field changes everything
At a 4% withdrawal rate, every $100/month of benefits removes $30,000 from your target. A $2,400/month benefit cuts a $1,700,000 target to $980,000 — a 42% reduction. Running this tool with the field at zero and treating the result as your real gap is the single most common way to scare yourself with your own spreadsheet.