Show HN: Nesteggly – When will you retire?

After a career in financial advisory space, I became convinced that financial advisory companies are designed to keep you afraid and dependent on their wealth management services. Their ultimate goal is to have you save as much as possible and die with a vast fortune, which they’ll then have the privilege of overseeing for a 1% annual fee. If this wasn’t true, then their incentive structures wouldn’t be what they are.

Retirement planning doesn’t need to be so complicated that you pay someone upward of $10,000 per year to answer simple questions like, “How much should I be saving?” or “How much should I withdraw from my portfolio?” or “When can I retire?” These are all questions that can be answered by formulas.

So, four months ago I debuted a proof of concept of what I wanted to be the ultimate retirement calculator. It combines several useful ideas:

  1. For those who aren’t retired yet, simultaneously models both the accrual AND drawdown phases. This eliminates the guesswork of manually calculating how much savings you’ll need in the future.

  2. The ability to plan around social security and/or a pension (the typical thing to do is to either pretend that they don’t exist or almost exclusively depend on them).

  3. And lastly, the ability to draw down your savings.

It ended up being pretty popular[0], so I incorporated everyone's feedback and then some. Here’s the shortlist of enhancements:

  1. Graphs to illustrate the balance of your portfolio and the components of income during the retirement phase.

  2. A ‘pension’ parameter, for folks who have a non-inflation-adjusted pension (90% of pensions are like this).

  3. A ‘size of estate’ parameter, to specify how big (or little) an estate you’d like to leave behind.

  4. Numerous UI improvements, including slider bars, financial insights, and a HUD to facilitate experimentation and ‘what if’ analysis.

Looking forward to another great round of feedback.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23146836