Free retirement calculator questions, answered plainly

Questions & answers

Are there retirement calculators that don't require a login?

Yes. Reckon Wealth is a free retirement calculator that requires no login, no account, and no email. You enter your numbers and see your projection immediately. Your data is stored only in your browser using localStorage, so nothing is sent to a server and nothing is collected about you.

Which retirement calculators don't connect to your bank?

Reckon Wealth does not connect to your bank and does not use Plaid or any account-linking service. You type in your own savings, expenses, and income figures manually. There is no access to your actual financial accounts at any point.

What is a Monte Carlo retirement calculator?

A Monte Carlo retirement calculator runs hundreds of simulated market sequences rather than assuming one fixed rate of return. Reckon Wealth runs 500 simulations and reports the percentage of them in which your money lasts through retirement. This gives you a probability of success instead of a single optimistic number, and it accounts for sequence-of-returns risk, which is the order in which good and bad market years occur.

Is there a free retirement calculator that doesn't push you toward a financial advisor?

Yes. Reckon Wealth has no advisor referral funnel. It does not collect your contact information, does not sell leads, and does not schedule sales calls. It gives you a projection and nothing else, and it is free with no subscription or trial.

Are retirement calculator results in today's dollars or future dollars?

Every figure Reckon Wealth shows is in today's dollars, deflated at 3% annual inflation. A projected balance of $928,000 means it buys what $928,000 buys now, not the larger number a future statement would print. This matters because a savings target of 25 times your spending is already a today's-dollars figure, so showing a projected balance in future dollars beside it would compare two different units and make the plan look further along than it is. The spending and contribution amounts you enter are treated the same way: the planner assumes you hold them level in today's dollars.

Does the retirement calculator account for fees and taxes?

No, and both are stated plainly rather than buried. The growth rates are gross returns, so no expense ratio, advisory fee, platform fee, or trading cost is deducted and no fee drag is built into them. A portfolio charging 0.50% a year turns a base 8% into roughly 7.5% before inflation, so subtract your all-in cost from the growth rate if you want the projection to reflect what you actually pay. Taxes on withdrawals are not modelled either: distributions from 401(k)s and traditional IRAs are generally taxed as ordinary income.

How accurate are Monte Carlo retirement projections?

Monte Carlo projections are estimates, not guarantees. Their value is that they show a realistic range of outcomes based on historical market variability rather than a single assumed return. The accuracy depends on the assumptions used for returns, inflation, and spending. Reckon Wealth lets you choose conservative, base, and optimistic scenarios so you can see how sensitive your plan is to those assumptions. No projection can predict actual future markets.

Does the retirement calculator account for debt like credit cards or student loans?

Yes. You can enter your total non-mortgage balance, its interest rate, and what you pay each month, and the planner works out how long that takes to clear. Your projected spending then drops once the balance is paid off, the same way it does when a mortgage ends. If your payment does not cover the interest, the planner says so rather than assuming a payoff that never arrives.

Does paying off debt change my retirement number?

No. Your retirement number stays 25 times the annual spending you entered. A debt that clears in a few years is not part of the spending you carry through retirement, so including it in a lifetime target would overstate what you need. Debt changes the year-by-year projection rather than the goal. The planner also asks whether your monthly spending figure already includes the debt payment, so the same dollars are never counted twice.

Can a retirement calculator handle two people and Social Security?

Yes. Reckon Wealth supports multi-person households and lets you enter when each person expects Social Security to begin, rather than assuming a single individual. Many free calculators only model one person.