How much do you need, and are you on track?

"How much do I need to retire?" is the question everyone starts with, and the honest answer is that it depends on what you'll spend, how long you'll live, and what the market does along the way. The guides below work through each piece, from a fast way to get a first number to why inflation keeps that number moving and how to test it against the futures you can't predict. When you're ready to put real figures in, the calculator runs the whole thing as a Monte Carlo simulation.

What a retirement plan actually has to answer

A retirement plan answers three linked questions, namely how much money you need, where it will come from, and how confident you can be that it lasts. Most people fixate on the first and skip the other two, which is how a plan that looks fine on a spreadsheet still falls apart in practice. The number you need is not a fixed figure you can look up. It moves with your spending, your time horizon, the income you have already secured, and the order in which good and bad market years happen to arrive.

The guides in this section take those pieces one at a time. The aim is to get you from a rough estimate to a number you can act on, and then to a way of testing whether that number holds up under conditions you cannot predict.

Start with the number, then make it honest

The fastest estimate comes from your spending, not your salary. Multiply what you expect to spend in a year of retirement by about 25 and you have a starting target. That single multiplier hides a lot, though. It assumes your portfolio funds every dollar you spend, when Social Security or a pension usually covers a meaningful share, which can cut the portfolio target sharply. Our guide on how much you need to retire works through building the number from real spending and subtracting the income you do not have to save for.

The number does not sit still

Inflation moves your target while you are aiming at it. A budget that feels comfortable today buys less every year, and over a retirement that can run thirty years or more, the gap compounds into real money. A plan that ignores it can look funded now and still come up short later, so keep your target in today's dollars and let the calculator grow your spending with prices.

Why one number is never the whole plan

Even a careful target rests on assumptions that may not hold. The biggest is the order of your investment returns. Two retirees with the same average return can end up in very different places depending on when the down years land, because selling assets for income while the market is low does lasting damage. Longevity is the other unknown. Plan for thirty years and live thirty-five, and the last five have to come from somewhere.

That uncertainty is where a single average return stops being useful. Running your plan as a Monte Carlo simulation replays it against hundreds of randomized return sequences and records how often the money lasts to the age you set. The result is a probability of success rather than one guess, which tells you how much room for bad luck the plan actually has.

Telling whether you are on track

Being on track is less about hitting a savings milestone by a given age and more about whether your current path clears a comfortable success probability. That depends on all the inputs together, from your savings and contributions to your spending, retirement age, and the income you will draw. Change one and the others shift. The practical way to check is to put your real figures in, read the probability, then adjust the levers you control, mostly your savings rate and your retirement date, until the plan holds.