Projects retirement readiness from savings rate, target nest egg, and compound growth - computes the required portfolio via safe-withdrawal-rate math, years to financial independence, and pension or Social Security offsets, with a runnable calculator. Use when someone asks "how much do I need to retire", "am I on track to retire at 60", "what does my savings rate get me", or "can I retire early". General financial education, not personalized investment advice. Do NOT use for choosing funds or setting an asset allocation - use investment-basics instead; do NOT use for a full financial plan with budgeting and insurance - use financial-planner instead.
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name: Retirement Projection
description: Projects retirement readiness from savings rate, target nest egg, and compound growth - computes the required portfolio via safe-withdrawal-rate math, years to financial independence, and pension or Social Security offsets, with a runnable calculator. Use when someone asks "how much do I need to retire", "am I on track to retire at 60", "what does my savings rate get me", or "can I retire early". General financial education, not personalized investment advice. Do NOT use for choosing funds or setting an asset allocation - use investment-basics instead; do NOT use for a full financial plan with budgeting and insurance - use financial-planner instead.
---
# Retirement Projection
Retirement planning is not about picking a magic number - it is about the relationship between savings rate, time, and withdrawal needs. Small differences in savings rate now create enormous differences in outcomes later, and the most common projection errors are the flattering ones: nominal returns instead of real, base withdrawal rates for 40-year retirements, and forgetting healthcare before government coverage kicks in.
This is general financial education, not personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. Projections rest on uncertain assumptions about returns, inflation, longevity, and taxes.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: spending comes first because it drives the nest-egg target, and offsets must be subtracted before the withdrawal-rate division - applying them afterward double-counts.
### Step 1: Gather inputs
Collect, with defaults; label anything estimated as a guess:
- Current age and intended retirement age (if unknown, solve for it - that is what the calculator does).
- Current invested assets and annual savings across all accounts.
- Expected annual retirement spending in today's dollars. Default estimate: 70-80% of current pre-retirement income, reflecting lower work costs and ended savings contributions. Adjust up for planned travel and for healthcare before Medicare (or local) eligibility - the most significantly underestimated line item; adjust down for paid-off housing.
- Expected pension/Social Security income (use the official government estimator, not a guess).
- Return assumption. Use a REAL (after-inflation) return of 4-5% for a diversified portfolio; using 8-10% nominal against today's-dollar spending is the classic error that overstates readiness by a decade.