Retirement Calculator

The question "When can I retire?" is really a question about expenses and passive income. If you can keep your expenses low, retiring earlier is more readily achievable. In the numerous meetings I have had with financial advisors, invariably the question that starts all retirement planning is "When should we plan for your death?" I immediately bristled at this question every time and have concluded it is not the correct way to think about it. I prefer to assume I will never die and plan my finances accordingly. That is the philosophy I have applied to my determination of how much is enough. My basic formula is if you have saved 30x your annual expenses you should be able to comfortably stop work. While that is an easy statement there is plenty to think about in both how you save (what types of accounts) and making a realistic estimation of annual expenses.

I made this javascript calculator to better understand the overall personal financial picture and project a reasonable retirement timeline based on savings rates and current expenses. After making the calculator I realized the logical next question is what next steps one should take to improve their current state. Since most of the information needed is already in the calculator to make the curve I added a series of discrete, incremental steps that can be taken to get to the next level of financial stability.

Feel free to play with the inputs and see if you agree with the advice. I am always interested in hearing feedback (contact@fiftypoundsorless.com) for things that may be not clear or could be improved. Just to be clear, none if this is personally identifying data. It does not store or send any data anywhere, it is only a live calculation. Also, I only did limited testing so you may encounter some random bugs. Most of them are a result of me not knowing how to code worth anything but I have found and fixed several of my dumb coder mistakes and expect I missed many more.