Advanced Edition
Your Magic Number
The free tool shows your number. This edition shows whether you'll actually hit it — your plan run through 1,000 simulated market histories, stress-tested against real shocks, with your actual allocation, taxes, and debt in the model.
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Pick a starting point to pre-fill every field, then adjust anything to match your situation.
New in the Advanced Edition
Returns & volatility
Pick a profile to fill the mix, expected returns, and volatility below — then edit any cell to match your actual portfolio.
Enter your mix and expected return for each asset class in each life phase. Blended returns replace the simple assumptions above.
| Asset class | Build % | Build return | Retire % | Retire return |
|---|
A diversified stock-heavy portfolio has historically run near 15–18%; a balanced portfolio nearer 9–12%.
Will your plan survive?
Ten stress tests
Does your plan still fund your dream lifestyle to age — under each shock? Select any stress test to see how it changes the range of outcomes in the graph below.
Range of outcomes
Select any stress test below to draw it on this chart.
What moves your number most
Each lever ranked by how many years sooner it makes you work-optional. Select any lever to run it through the simulation and see the improved range of outcomes in the graph above.
Cash-flow X-ray
Everything above models a drawdown. The survival odds, the stress tests, and the declining median path all assume you fund retirement by selling assets — taking a percentage out each year and hoping markets cooperate. That assumption is what makes a bad first decade so dangerous, and it is why the odds above are what they are.
There is another way to fund a retirement: build a portfolio that pays you, so your income comes from what your assets produce rather than from selling them off.
This is my specialty. I focus on income-oriented strategies designed to generate meaningful cash flow from your principal — dividends, interest, real assets, and structured income — so you can live on what your portfolio produces without steadily dipping into the principal itself. That changes the picture above in two ways: the crossover in your cash-flow X-ray arrives on income you actually receive rather than on paper growth you have to sell into, and a portfolio that is not being liquidated in a downturn is far less exposed to the sequence-of-returns risk driving those stress-test failures.
Income strategies carry their own risks and no approach can guarantee a given level of income or prevent loss. The right mix depends on your tax situation, time horizon, and risk tolerance — which is exactly the conversation to have together.
These are odds, not a plan.
These odds are a model, not a verdict. Every figure above is generated from simplified assumptions: normally distributed returns, a constant inflation rate, one blended effective tax rate, level contributions, and whatever you typed into the form. Real markets have fat tails, crashes cluster, and returns are not independent from one year to the next — so treat the survival percentage as a directional read on resilience, not a probability of your actual life.
Just as importantly, this calculator has no visibility into the details that usually decide a retirement:
- Your actual account registrations, cost basis, and tax lots
- Social Security claiming strategy and spousal or survivor timing
- Roth conversion windows in low-income years
- Healthcare before Medicare, and Medicare IRMAA surcharges later
- Required minimum distributions and the order you draw accounts
- Insurance gaps, estate structure, and beneficiary design
- Concentrated stock, equity comp, business income, or a liquidity event
- How your cash flow actually moves month to month, and what changes when life does
When you work with me directly, we build your plan in RightCapital — a full financial planning platform whose calculations are far more thorough than anything a web calculator can do.
RightCapital models your real accounts and tax situation year by year, tests claiming and conversion strategies against each other, and updates as your life changes — so we can pressure-test a decision before you make it rather than after. This tool is a conversation starter and a way to frame the question. Your plan is the answer, and it is built for you, not for a set of averages.
Build my real plan in RightCapitalEvery number here rests on assumptions you entered, and a calculator can only ever be as good as those assumptions. And these odds are not fixed. Several of the stress tests above can be materially improved with adjustments we make together — how your income is generated in retirement, where your assets sit for tax purposes, the order you draw accounts, how much cash cushion you hold going into a downturn, and when you claim Social Security. Populus Wealth builds that plan with you, adjusts it over time, and finds ways to optimize your financial life — including your investments — to meet your dynamic goals, rather than just this snapshot in time using this calculator.
Book a consult with Populus Wealth