Plan your 401k, IRA and savings goals.
Plan your 401k, IRA and savings goals.
Enter your current age, target retirement age, current savings balance, monthly contribution, and expected annual return. The calculator projects your estimated portfolio value at retirement and shows whether you're on track to meet a chosen income goal. Adjust the inputs to model different scenarios โ retiring earlier, saving more, or using a more conservative return assumption.
This calculator uses compound growth projections and standard retirement income rules of thumb. Results are estimates based on consistent inputs โ real-world returns vary year to year. Use this as a planning tool, not a guarantee.
A widely used guideline is the 4% rule: in retirement, you can withdraw 4% of your portfolio per year with a high probability of your money lasting 30 years. To find your target retirement number, multiply your desired annual income by 25. Want $60,000/year in retirement? Target $1,500,000. Want $80,000/year? Target $2,000,000.
This rule originated from the Trinity Study (1998) which analyzed historical market returns. While not a guarantee, it has held up through most 30-year historical windows. Some planners now use 3.3%โ3.5% for retirements longer than 30 years.
Investor A starts saving $300/month at 25 and stops at 35 โ contributing for just 10 years ($36,000 total). Investor B starts at 35 and saves $300/month until age 65 โ contributing for 30 years ($108,000 total). At retirement, with 8% average returns, Investor A ends up with more money. Why? Investor A's contributions had 30โ40 years to compound. Time in the market consistently beats amount in the market.
If your employer offers a 401(k) match, contribute at least enough to capture the full match before doing anything else. A 50% match up to 6% of salary is effectively a 50% instant return on your investment โ no market can consistently beat that. An employee earning $60,000 with a 3% match who doesn't contribute is leaving $1,800/year in free money on the table.
Social Security can cover a meaningful portion of retirement income โ the average benefit in 2025 is about $1,900/month ($22,800/year). Delaying Social Security from age 62 to 70 increases your benefit by roughly 77%. If you're in good health, waiting often makes financial sense and reduces the amount you need to save personally.
Retirement projections rest on assumptions, and two of them dominate everything else.
Your savings rate. Over long horizons this matters more than investment returns, because it is the input you fully control. Increasing contributions by a few percent of salary early in a career compounds into a very large difference by retirement.
Time. Money invested at 25 has forty years to compound; money invested at 45 has twenty. A modest amount started early routinely beats a much larger amount started later — which is the single strongest argument for starting before the numbers feel meaningful.
Long-run stock market returns have historically averaged somewhere around 7–10% annually before inflation, but averages conceal a great deal. Real sequences include multi-year declines, and the order in which returns arrive matters enormously near retirement.
This is sequence of returns risk: a large market fall in the first few years of drawing down a portfolio does far more damage than the same fall a decade later, because you are selling assets to fund living costs while prices are depressed. Two retirees with identical average returns can end up in very different positions depending purely on the order.
The practical response is to hold several years of expenses in lower-volatility assets as you approach retirement, so you are not forced to sell equities during a downturn.
A retirement target expressed in today's money is misleading. At 3% inflation, prices roughly double every 24 years — so a sum that sounds comfortable now buys about half as much in three decades.
What matters is the real return: nominal return minus inflation. A 7% return during 3% inflation is 4% in purchasing power. Projections quoting nominal figures without adjusting look considerably more reassuring than they should.
Any projection is a planning tool rather than a forecast. Revisit it every few years, adjust for what has actually happened, and treat the output as a direction of travel rather than a promise.
Fidelity's benchmarks: 1ร salary by 30, 3ร by 40, 6ร by 50, 8ร by 60, 10ร by 67. These are targets, not rules โ someone starting late can still catch up with higher contributions, especially after kids are through college and the mortgage is paid down.
Use 6โ7% for a diversified portfolio that includes bonds, or 7โ8% for a stock-heavy portfolio. Use 5โ6% if you're conservative or within 10 years of retirement. Avoid using historical stock market averages (10%) as your base case โ sequence-of-returns risk means the timing of downturns matters greatly near retirement.
Traditional contributions reduce your taxable income now; you pay taxes in retirement. Roth contributions are after-tax; withdrawals are tax-free. If you expect to be in a higher tax bracket in retirement, Roth wins. If you expect lower taxes in retirement, Traditional wins. Many advisors recommend having both for flexibility.