Rich, Broke or Dead?Guided planner
Welcome back — we kept your answers from last time.

Retirement is a decades-long cash-flow question: will your savings, plus the income you expect, cover what life costs for as long as you’re around?

This planner walks you through it in six short steps — who you’re planning for, what you’ve saved, and the income and spending you foresee — then projects your finances year by year across a wide range of market and lifespan outcomes, showing at every age how likely you are to end up rich, broke, or dead.

Use it to test whether your plan holds up over the decades ahead, and which adjustments most improve the odds.

Completely local and private. The whole simulation runs in this browser. Nothing you enter is sent to any server or cloud service — your answers live only in this browser’s own storage.

Step one · the cast

Who are we planning for?

A couple of quick facts set the stage — they choose the life-expectancy estimates the projection is built on.

Finish the birthday to continue

Step two · the nest egg

What have you saved so far?

Everything investable — retirement accounts, brokerage, cash. The chart shows how that sum could grow on its own, before any income or spending, in good markets and bad.

Total savings today
$

Step three · money in

What income is coming?

Add each stream as a monthly amount and when it runs. Salary now, Social Security later — the chart redraws as each one lands.

Step four · money out

What does life cost?

Start with everyday living, then layer anything with its own timeline — a mortgage that ends, travel that tapers, healthcare that grows.

Everyday living
$/month, for life
Other expenses

Nothing extra — everyday living covers it all.

Step five · the dials

Tune the machine

Sensible defaults are already set. Nudge what you know — skip what you don’t. Every dial redraws the projection.

How your money is invested
All cash & bondsBalancedAll stocks
Annual return
Inflation?Only fixed-return mode needs this. Historical runs replay each era’s actual inflation alongside its returns, so spending rises just as it did then.
Home & property

No property in the plan. That’s fine.

If markets turn against you

Spend exactly as planned, whatever the market does. The purest stress test.

Cut back while the portfolio is under water, spend normally otherwise.

Cut spending by
…when balance falls belowshare of starting savings, in today’s terms

Guyton-Klinger-style guardrails: whenever withdrawals run 20% hotter than where you started, spending steps down 10% — and steps back up when the portfolio runs ahead. Small course corrections instead of one big cut.

Reality dials
Years to projectthe simulation window
Average tax rate0% = amounts already net
Investment fees
If one of you diesthe survivor’s spending, vs. the couple’s
Show dollars as

The outlook

So… rich, broke or dead?

of the historical market runs since 1871, the money outlasted . A run only counts as a failure if the money gives out while someone is alive.

Withdrawal rate
Spending, year one
Median balance at the end
What would it take? · aiming for 95 of 100

Working it out…

Each lever solved on its own, holding everything else as entered.

Keep this plan

Saves as a scenario in the full calculator, where every number stays editable. Your partner carries over — both views run the same household model, so the numbers match.The full calculator counts a run as failed even if the money gives out after you’re gone, so its success rate can read lower than this one. Guardrails live only in this planner for now — the saved scenario uses fixed spending.