Free Retirement Planner
Find the day work becomes optional.
Not a savings-rate toy. This models your actual life — both careers, RSUs, rentals, kids and college, healthcare before Medicare, Social Security timing, and the taxes that quietly take a third — then pressure-tests it against 800 market histories and shows you the math behind every dollar. Change any number and your whole future re-solves in front of you.
Why Most Retirement Calculators Get It Wrong
The typical retirement calculator asks for one income, one savings rate, and one return assumption, then draws a smooth exponential curve. Real households don't work that way. Two people retire in different years. RSU vests are lumpy. A rental property throws off cash but also carries a mortgage. Daycare costs more than college for a few brutal years, then disappears. Healthcare between early retirement and Medicare is its own five-figure line item. And taxes, the largest single expense for most professional households, are usually ignored entirely.
This planner models each of those pieces explicitly. Every year of the projection resolves income, payroll and income taxes, spending, and account flows in order, the way your actual financial year does. Withdrawals in retirement follow tax-aware ordering, cash first, then taxable brokerage with capital-gains stacking, then pre-tax accounts, then Roth, and required minimum distributions force money out of pre-tax accounts at 73 whether you need it or not. The result is a projection you can interrogate line by line in the year-by-year table, not a curve you have to take on faith.
How to Read the Monte Carlo Success Rate
A deterministic projection assumes the market delivers the same return every single year. It never does, and the order of returns matters as much as the average. A crash in your first two years of retirement, while you're selling assets to live, does far more damage than the same crash ten years in. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it's why two households with identical average returns can end up in wildly different places.
The Monte Carlo tab runs your plan through hundreds of randomized market histories and reports the share where your money outlasts the plan. Treat 85%+ as solid, 65–85% as workable but sensitive, and below 65% as a plan that needs more margin, later retirement, lower spending, higher savings, or delayed Social Security. The shaded band on the chart shows where 80% of outcomes land; a durable plan is one you would still accept at the bottom of that band.
The Levers That Actually Move the Answer
After the savings rate, the biggest levers are usually: retirement age (each extra working year adds contributions, adds growth, and removes a withdrawal year, a triple effect), Social Security claiming age (delaying from 62 to 70 nearly doubles the monthly check, permanently, inflation-adjusted), spending in the first decade of retirement (when sequence risk is highest), and where you live (state tax on a $150k retirement draw ranges from $0 in Washington or Florida to five figures in California or New York). Change each one in the planner and watch the success rate respond, the point of a live model is that experiments are free.
Frequently asked questions
How much money do I need to retire?
A useful starting point is 25× your annual retirement spending net of guaranteed income (the 4% rule). If you'll spend $80,000 a year and Social Security covers $40,000, you need roughly 25 × $40,000 = $1M in investable assets. This planner computes that target from your actual spending, housing, healthcare, and Social Security, then stress-tests it with Monte Carlo simulation, which is more honest than any single multiple.
What is a Monte Carlo retirement simulation?
Instead of assuming the market returns the same percentage every year, a Monte Carlo simulation runs your plan through hundreds of randomized market histories, some with early crashes, some with booms. The output is a success rate: the share of simulated histories where your money outlasts your plan. A plan that survives 85%+ of histories is generally considered solid; below 65% needs more margin.
When should I claim Social Security?
You can claim between 62 and 70. Claiming at 62 permanently cuts your benefit about 30% below your full-retirement-age amount; waiting until 70 permanently raises it 24%. Delaying is effectively buying more inflation-protected lifetime income, usually the right call for the higher earner in a couple if you expect average or better longevity. Model both claiming ages in this planner and compare the Monte Carlo success rates.
How does this planner handle taxes?
It applies 2024 federal brackets with the standard deduction, FICA payroll taxes with the Social Security wage cap, self-employment tax on business income, long-term capital gains stacking on withdrawals from taxable brokerage accounts, taxation of Social Security benefits via the provisional-income test, required minimum distributions at 73, and a flat approximation of your state's income tax. It is a planning model, not tax software, but it is far closer to reality than calculators that ignore taxes entirely.
What withdrawal order does the model use in retirement?
Cash above your emergency floor first, then taxable brokerage (paying capital gains on the growth portion), then pre-tax retirement accounts (taxed as ordinary income), then Roth last. Spending tax-free Roth dollars last gives them the longest runway to compound, the standard tax-aware default. RMDs at 73 are forced out of pre-tax accounts automatically.
How should I account for my house in retirement planning?
Your home is net worth you can't spend without selling, so this planner tracks home equity separately from investable assets. The retirement readiness math runs on investable assets only, while your mortgage payment, property tax, insurance, and maintenance flow through annual expenses. When the mortgage pays off, your required spending drops automatically, which is often a bigger retirement lever than people expect.
How much does healthcare cost if I retire before 65?
Budget $20,000–$28,000 per year for a couple buying ACA marketplace coverage between retirement and Medicare at 65, this 'bridge' period is the most underestimated cost in early retirement. After 65, plan roughly $6,000–$8,000 per person per year for Medicare premiums and out-of-pocket costs, growing faster than general inflation. Both phases are modeled separately in this planner.
Is my financial data private?
Yes. Every calculation runs in your browser, your numbers never touch a server. Plans persist in your own browser storage, and the share link encodes the plan in the URL itself, so only people you send it to can see it.