Retirement Calculators

Retirement planning is the single most consequential application of compound interest in personal finance. Money invested at 25 has 40 years to grow before you touch it; the same dollar invested at 45 has 20 years. Because compounding scales with time, the early dollar is worth roughly 4-5x the late dollar in retirement. Our retirement calculators are built to make this trade-off visible and to help you see when small changes today move the needle decades from now.

Start with the basic 401(k) and IRA calculators to project how a given contribution rate and employer match will grow under historical market returns. The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) calculator shows what savings rate is required to reach financial independence at any chosen age, using the 4% rule as a withdrawal baseline. The retirement income, RMD, and 72(t) calculators handle the harder problem on the other side: drawing money down without running out.

Roth-vs-traditional comparisons get their own dedicated calculator because the right answer depends on whether your current marginal tax rate is higher or lower than your expected retirement rate — and that's rarely obvious. Annuity, pension, lump-sum-vs-annuity, and Social Security benefit calculators round out the income-side tools. The retirement shortfall calculator estimates how big a gap exists between projected savings and projected need, in today's dollars.

Contribution limits and tax rules are updated each year per IRS guidance (Publication 590-B for IRAs, Publication 575 for pensions). Social Security estimates use the formulas published by the SSA. All projections assume the contribution and return rates you input continue unchanged — real markets don't behave that way, so treat results as planning scenarios, not predictions. None of this is tax or investment advice; speak to a fiduciary advisor before making large allocation changes.