401K Calculator for Tension-free Retirement
If you are comfortable with surfing the Internet and use the click of a mouse, multitude number of sites would bring thousands of retirement calculators or 401K calculators with various schemes and plans for your safe retirement life. The different strategies and assumptions may make your head spin because each tool has a different idea and logic involved in the calculation done. In order to find the best one, I tested three calculators from different web sites. I am a person who supports the open source and hence researched the freeware calculators that were available.
Research Inferences
I have inserted the data about a person who is at his 45 years of age. He does not have any dependent and is earning $50,000 per annum. He likes to retire at the age of 65 and he wants to keep $90,000 for himself per annum. I have assumed that he is expected to live up to 100 years. What will be the solution for him to live peacefully without any financial crisis?
1. Experience with BallPark Estimate
The calculator I tried first was Ballpark Estimate. According to the calculation of this 401K calculator, a person who is earning an annual income of $50,000 should save 55% of his annual income. Only then, it is easy for him to get the same amount after his retirement. If the retirement age exceeds 70 or 75, then we can reduce the percentage of savings in this methodology. The site took only overall 9 minutes of my precious time to complete the questionnaire. The quick results revealed the experience of the site. You can also add your part time job income and other investment returns in the calculations easily here. The big drawback in this calculation is that you cannot make major adjustments and fiddle with the numbers in between. If ever you intend doing that, you have to start the calculations from the beginning.
2. Experience with Nationwide’s Retirability Calculator
The next calculator I tried was Nationwide’s Retirability Calculator. This 401K Calculator gives its calculation through its ‘R-Score’. A good score is above 100. The poor subject scores about 88. The calculator works very fast and gives the result within 8 minutes. Quality wise, it is easy to use and provides clear and fair results. When I completed the questionnaire, the calculator provided a very user friendly result. The added advantage in this calculator is that the inputs like home equity also can even be added while performing the calculation.
3. Experience with Calculator at American Association of Retired Persons
The next calculator I tried was American Association of Retired Persons web site. This 401K calculator advises to save over $1600 instead of $417 per month. Giving advice is easy. In reality, it is difficult to save bigger amounts, unless a person has extra investment or a part time job. The calculation took only 10 minutes. It is very fast and quality is excellent. The results were displayed in simple and easy to read manner. There was no fancy animation or features visible.
Withal, of all the 401K calculators I researched, I found the three listed above to be very useful and informative.
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