Tell me when I can retire calculator

If you want to know when you can retire you’ve come to the right place.

Our retirement calculator simplifies savings and investment goals, but most importantly it tells you how long you have remaining before the big day.

Simply enter a few numbers and we’ll tell you how long it is going to take you to reach your goal.

No matter whether you are saving for retirement or something else we’ve got you covered.

Here’s the calculator but if you run into any issues we’ve included a simple guide below:

Tell me when I can retire

Calculator guide

We only ask for four pieces of information.

For most people, most of the time two of those are going to need a bit of thinking about.

Let’s deal with the easy ones first.

Starting amount

This is how much money you already have. It could be zero, it could be millions.

Think savings and investment accounts, ISAs and pensions.

Just add them all up and enter the total here.

If you have personal or work place pensions you should have a recent balance statement, but if not, just give the provider a call and ask for one.

Monthly savings

Again, this should be pretty self explanatory for most people.

How much can you put away each month to help reach your goal.

And again, this could be zero, but equally it could be more than your starting amount.

I’m sure it goes without the saying that the more you can save the quicker you can reach your goal.

Target amount

Your target amount is how much you need to save up in total.

This will depend on many things, especially when we are talking about retirement.

It’s definitely worth having a good think about this.

That said, there’s a mathematical way to calculate the total amount you need if you know your annual spend.

It assumes your money is invested in stocks and bonds (as most pensions are by the way).

And the good news is, we’ve crunched the numbers so that you don’t need to in the table below:

Notice, there are two columns. There’s a moderate and a conservative option.

The conservative option is playing it a bit safer, but the moderate approach is still used by lots of people, particularly finance professionals.

Also notice, there are some small numbers starting at £1K in the income column.

If you are thinking nobody can live off £1K per year, you are probably right.

These small numbers are included so you can add them to the big ones if you want a more accurate answer. (See Example 2)

The following examples use the moderate numbers.

Example 1.

John needs £30K to live on annually. That means he needs to save up £750,000.

But he already has £250K in various pension and savings accounts so actually he only needs to save £500K.

Example 2.

Lisa needs £45K annually. She doesn’t have any existing savings.

As there’s no £45K column we simply add the £40K to the £5K column, so she needs £1,125,000.

Investment return

Whilst we’d love to tell you what to enter here, the truth is, we can’t. We don’t know what the future holds for investment returns.

Anybody who says otherwise is telling fibs.

But what we can do, is provide an idea based on some in-depth research by esteemed professors Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton over at Credit Suisse.

They use over a century of data to take a stab at what future returns might be.

The table below neatly summarises these.

Nominal returns include inflation. Real returns do not.

Entering nominal returns into the investment return box will give you a better idea of how much money you will have.

Alternatively, entering real returns will give you a better idea of what you buying power is likely to be.

No. of years to reach target

The number of years to reach target box tells you how many years it’s going to take to reach your target.

It’s years not months, meaning 4.5 = 4 years and 6 months.

Tell Me When I Can Retire Calculator – The bottom line

So there you have it. Our calculator crunches the numbers so that you don’t have to.

No matter whether you are saving for retirement or some other shorter term goal we’ve got you covered.

So I think there’s only one thing left to say:

Good luck!