Retirement Calculator
A retirement calculator tells you whether your savings will last. Most stop there. RetireWise also accounts for healthcare costs before Medicare, the Rule of 55, real estate equity, and how spending naturally changes through retirement. Your plan runs through 10,000 simulated market sequences so you see the full range of outcomes, not just the average.
The short answer
- Enter your savings, expenses, ages, and timeline in about 5 minutes.
- The simulator runs 10,000 versions of your retirement against varying market sequences (a Monte Carlo simulation).
- You get a success rate, a year-by-year balance projection, and comparisons of retiring earlier or later.
What you'll need
- Current age, planned retirement age, and life expectancy estimate
- Pre-tax (401k/IRA), Roth, and taxable brokerage balances
- Annual contributions and any employer match
- Expected annual retirement spending and a healthcare cost estimate before Medicare
- Social Security expected annual benefit and claim age (if known)
How RetireWise handles it
Most online retirement calculators use a single projection: pick an average annual return, compound forward, see if you run out. That's misleading because real markets don't deliver the average every year. A bad first decade can sink an otherwise viable plan even if the long-run average is fine. This is called sequence-of-returns risk.
RetireWise runs a Monte Carlo simulation: 10,000 retirements through 10,000 different market sequences. Each sequence draws annual returns from a normal distribution around your assumed mean and standard deviation. The output is a distribution of outcomes (the 10th percentile for bad luck, the median, the 90th percentile for good luck) plus the share of trials in which you don't run out of money.
The simulator also models the things most calculators skip: a healthcare cost bridge from retirement to Medicare at 65, the Rule of 55 for penalty-free 401(k) access if you separate at 55+, the option to sell or downsize your home as portfolio fuel, rental income, the three retirement spending phases (go-go / slow-go / no-go), and side-by-side comparisons of retiring at 50, 55, 60, 62, and 65.
Nothing is stored. Your inputs live in your browser session and clear when you close the tab. There's no signup. You can optionally export your simulation as a JSON file you keep yourself.
Related questions
- Can I retire at 55? (Rule of 55, healthcare bridge, 10-year Social Security gap)
- Can I retire at 60? (5-year healthcare gap, Social Security timing)
- What is a Monte Carlo simulation? (The math behind the success rate)
- Sequence-of-returns risk (Why the order of returns matters more than the average)