A simple benchmark to get started saving for retirement. If you want to get serious about saving, check out pocketpatch.
A simple benchmark to get started saving for retirement. If you want to get serious about saving, check out pocketpatch.
This is an exercise to create a benchmark for your retirement saving targets.
It's important to emphazise that these sort of calculators make a lot of assumptions that might not hold in the future, so take the results with a grain of salt.
The idea behind this is simple: you should save as much as possible for retirement, BUT, you also have to live now, so saving enough to cover your current expenses in retirement (under reasonable assumptions) should give you some peace of mind.
This should be only a baseline, something to help you get started.
By default we assume 7% returns on your investments while saving, which is roughly what a US equities market ETF has historically returned, 4.5% return after retirement (shifting to a more conservative bond market ETF) and 2% inflation, which is a rough average for the US in the past 25 years.
From your monthly expenses, we calculate an equivalent, adjusted for inflation, for the time you expect to retire.
From that monthly payout, we calculate a fund that can give you that payout throughout the duration of your retirement, given the assumed post-retirement return on investment and inflation.
Finally we calculate how much you would need to invest each month to build up the required fund, with the assumed rate of return after retirement and inflation.
Built by perezperret, using Vercel serverless Python functions.
Have a look at my blog where I occasionally write about personal finance.
Check out the source code on GitHub.