Project your nest egg at retirement age, and how long it's likely to last once you start drawing it down.
| Age | Phase | Balance |
|---|
Projected balance the day you retire.
This calculator models retirement in two stages. First, the accumulation phase compounds your current savings and monthly contributions at your assumed growth rate until your chosen retirement age. Then the drawdown phase assumes a more conservative return and subtracts your planned annual withdrawal each year until the balance is estimated to run out.
Most retirement guidance suggests shifting toward a more conservative, income-focused portfolio after retiring, so this tool defaults the drawdown-phase return to a lower 3% rather than your pre-retirement growth rate — it's a simplification, not a substitute for a real withdrawal-strategy plan.
Inflation, taxes on withdrawals, Social Security or pension income, and market volatility are all left out for clarity. Treat the 'lasts until age' figure as a rough sensitivity check, not a guarantee.
No — all figures are in today's dollars with no inflation adjustment. For a long horizon, consider using a lower real (inflation-adjusted) return rate to get a more conservative estimate.
A commonly cited rule of thumb is withdrawing around 4% of the balance in the first year and adjusting for inflation after that — this tool instead uses a fixed dollar withdrawal, which you can tune to test different rates against your own projected balance.
Each year it grows by the assumed drawdown-phase return and then shrinks by your annual withdrawal — if withdrawals exceed growth, the balance declines year over year until it's projected to reach zero.