Retirement Calculator

A retirement projection has two halves that most calculators only show one of. The first is accumulation: a balance you already hold, plus everything you pay in between now and the day you stop, compounding the whole way. The second is drawdown: that pot spent over a retirement of unknown length, still invested, still growing, and still losing purchasing power to inflation every year. This calculator runs both, month by month, and reports every headline figure in today's dollars — because a seven-figure number thirty years out is not the number you can reason about.

Why the two figures differ so much. Saving $500 a month from 35 to 67 on top of $50,000 already saved, at a 7% return, ends with $1,118,030 in the account. At 3% inflation, that buys what $434,173 buys today. Both are true; only the second one tells you anything about the life it funds. The gap is not a rounding detail — it is more than half the headline.

What the monthly income means. The income figure is the level amount, in today's money, that spends the pot down to exactly zero at the age you set. For the plan above that is $2,365 a month to age 90. The withdrawal itself rises with inflation each year — the first month pays $6,106 in the money of thirty-two years out — so what it buys stays flat across all 23 years. Level-in-dollars withdrawals would start higher and quietly halve in what they buy by the end.

The 4% rule, for comparison. The familiar rule of thumb takes 4% of the pot in the first year and raises it with inflation thereafter, aiming never to run the balance to zero. On the same plan it pays $1,447 a month rather than $2,365. The difference is the price of leaving an estate and of surviving a bad first decade: spending the pot to zero by a fixed age is the more efficient plan and the more fragile one.

Real return is a ratio, not a subtraction. A 7% return against 3% inflation is not a 4% real return — it is (1.07 ÷ 1.03) − 1, or 3.88%. Over 32 years the difference between those two figures compounds into tens of thousands of dollars. When the return you enter is below inflation the real return goes negative, and the calculator handles it: the pot still pays an income, just a smaller one than dividing it evenly would.

Nominal balances keep climbing after you retire. Watch the chart around the retirement age. On the default plan the account balance is still rising at 68 — $1,119,673, up from $1,118,030 — because a 7% return on a million dollars outruns the first year of withdrawals. The today's-dollars line falls from the first month. That divergence is the single most useful thing a real-terms projection shows you, and it is invisible on a chart that plots only the account statement.

The contribution raise matters more than it looks. $500 a month held flat for 32 years is $500 that buys $194 of today's goods by the end. Stepping the contribution up 3% a year — roughly what a cost-of-living raise does — turns the same plan's $434,173 into $538,228 in today's money, and the monthly income from $2,365 into $2,932. You pay in $315,017 rather than $192,000 to get there, but the payments track your income rather than shrinking against it.

Time is the input with the most leverage. Running the same plan from 25 instead of 35 — same contribution, same return — lands at $660,232 in today's money instead of $434,173, a 52% larger pot for $60,000 more paid in. Moving the retirement age the other way cuts hard in both directions at once: retiring at 62 rather than 67 leaves $347,438, and it has to last five years longer, so the income drops from $2,365 to $1,685 a month.

What this model does and does not include. Contributions are paid at the end of each month and earn nothing in the month they arrive. The return is applied as a single steady rate, so there is no sequence-of-returns risk, no crash in year one of retirement, and no rebalancing. There is no tax — not on contributions, growth or withdrawals — and no employer match, Social Security, pension or annuity. Add those separately: the figure here is what your own invested savings produce, and other income sits on top of it.

Link to this tool with values filled in

Everything after the # stays in your browser — it is never sent to a server — so a link like this opens the tool ready to go without the values travelling anywhere but the address bar:

https://crunchify.net/tools/retirement-calculator#age=35&retireage=67&balance=50000&contribution=500

Join the settings with &, and percent-encode each value so that spaces, newlines and any #, &, = or % inside one do not break the link. Leave a setting out to accept its default. If a setting is not recognised, the page says so rather than quietly ignoring it.

• age (also currentageornowage) — a whole number from 0 to 100, required. The saver’s age today.
• retireage (also retirementage,retireorretireat) — a whole number from 1 to 110, required. The age contributions stop and withdrawals start. Must be above `age`.
• balance (also savings,current,principal,startornestegg) — a whole number from 0 to 1000000000000, required. Retirement savings already put by, in dollars.
• contribution (also monthly,deposit,monthlycontributionorsave) — a whole number from 0 to 1000000000, required. Paid in every month until retirement, in dollars.
• endage (also lastage,lifeexpectancy,untilorlastuntil) — a whole number from 2 to 120, defaults to 90. The age the money has to last to. It is spent down to zero by then.
• return (also rate,growth,apr,interestorannualreturn) — a whole number from -20 to 30, defaults to 7. Expected annual return as a percentage, before inflation.
• inflation (also inflationrateorcpi) — a whole number from 0 to 30, defaults to 3. Annual inflation as a percentage. It is what makes the figures real-dollar.
• increase (also raise,contributiongrowthorescalation) — a whole number from 0 to 30, defaults to 0. Percent the monthly contribution steps up by each year. Set it to the inflation rate to hold the contribution steady in today’s dollars.

The tool reads these on arrival but never writes them back, so what you type here stays out of your browser history.