Retirement Calculator
"When can I retire?" deserves a real answer, not a rule of thumb. This simulates your money month by month — in today's dollars — until it finds the first date your portfolio can carry your spending all the way through. Then it shows you exactly which lever moves that date.
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The retirement math, without the fog
Most retirement calculators quietly cheat in one of two directions: they show you dazzling nominal balances that 30 years of inflation will hollow out, or they wave the 4% rule at a retirement it was never tested on. This one does the boring, honest thing instead — it keeps everything in today's dollars, growing your money at the real return (your expected return with inflation divided out), so the $5,000 a month you type stays $5,000 of actual groceries and rent.
The headline answer doesn't come from a formula. The calculator simulates every month: your savings compound, contributions land, and then — for each candidate retirement date — it plays the whole drawdown forward, withdrawing what you need each month (less Social Security once it starts) until your plan-to age. The first date the money never runs out is the date you see.
- Simulation vs. the 4% rule: both numbers are shown side by side. The rule of thumb nets your other income off spending as if it started on day one; the simulation knows it doesn't — that gap is real money.
- Savings rate dominates early: in the first decades, what you contribute moves the date far more than what the market does — there's simply not much money compounding yet. Late in the game it flips, and returns (which you don't control) take over. The "what moves the date" panel makes this concrete.
- Honesty about uncertainty: a stress test re-runs your whole plan at returns 2% colder and 2% hotter, because the difference between those worlds is usually measured in years, not months.
You also get a Coast-FIRE date — the month you could stop contributing entirely and still retire on schedule — and a year-by-year plan you can export, so the whole trajectory is inspectable, not a black box.
Common questions
- How much money do I need to retire?
- Start with the 4% rule: 25 times the annual spending your portfolio must cover after other income — $3,000 a month net works out to about $900,000 in today's dollars. But that's a thumb-rule that ignores timing; Social Security usually starts years into retirement, so the simulated answer here is often meaningfully lower. The calculator shows both so you can see the gap for your own numbers.
- Is the 4% rule still safe?
- It's a heuristic from 30-year U.S. backtests, not a law of nature. It has survived some ugly history, but a bad run of returns early in retirement — sequence-of-returns risk — can break a plan the averages bless, and retirements longer than 30 years argue for a lower rate. The safe-withdrawal input lets you test 3.5% or anything else; the headline date comes from the full simulation either way.
- Is anything saved or sent anywhere?
- No. Every number runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored, or shared — and you can export the year-by-year plan to CSV with one click.
The contribution is the hard part
Knowing the date is easy — finding the $1,500 every month is the work. Taly auto-splits each paycheck so the retirement contribution comes out first, before life has a chance to spend it.