Free Tool
Your Magic Number
Your Magic Number is the portfolio size at which your investment returns alone can cover your dream lifestyle — work becomes optional, and your money has a reasonable chance of continuing to grow. Your expenses and dream lifestyle are assumed to rise with inflation, and every figure is shown in today’s dollars.
Pick a starting point to pre-fill every field, then adjust anything to match your situation.
Where you are today
Income & spending
Expected income in retirement
Only outside income you'll receive without touching your portfolio — Social Security, a pension, an annuity, or net rental income. This is not the income you want to live on in retirement; that's your dream lifestyle spending above. Leave it at 0 if you're unsure.
Assets
Only your investment portfolio counts toward your Magic Number — other assets build net worth but generally can't generate spendable retirement income. If some of your cash is truly investable, include it in the portfolio instead.
Your debts
Debt is critical to an honest number: every dollar of debt payment is a dollar you can't invest. List each debt — we amortize the payments and show when they clear.
Assumptions
Taxes in retirement
Your withdrawals are taxed, so you must pull out more than you spend. Enter your expected effective rates in retirement — the average share of withdrawals lost to tax, not your top bracket. Leave state at 0 for FL, TX, WA, NV, TN, SD, WY, AK, NH.
Already know your numbers? Skip ahead — the Advanced Edition adds survival odds, stress tests and your asset allocation.
Every number above assumes you are withdrawing from your principal. The withdrawal-rate model is a drawdown model: it assumes you sell down a percentage of your portfolio each year to fund your life, and that markets cooperate enough to keep the balance from running out. That is the standard way these calculators work — and it is why a higher withdrawal rate is riskier, and why a lower one demands a larger number.
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 that you can live on what your portfolio produces without steadily dipping into the principal itself. Clients who plan this way often need a different, and frequently smaller, number than a pure drawdown model suggests, and they keep their capital working for them and for whoever comes after them.
Income strategies involve their own risks and no approach can guarantee a given level of income or prevent loss. What the right mix looks like depends on your tax situation, time horizon, and risk tolerance — which is exactly the conversation to have together.
The first card is the no-drawdown number: enough that the income your portfolio produces covers your life without selling any of it. The rest assume you draw principal down. Your stated lifestyle sits at the 3.5% Base rate. Drawing at a higher rate means spending more than you said you needed — so the portfolio required grows, and work-optional arrives later. Drawing less gets you there sooner on a leaner life.
Your shortfall — what it takes to get there
Portfolio trajectory
Want to pressure-test this number?
The Advanced Edition runs your plan through roughly 1,000 simulated market histories for survival odds, adds stress tests (a crash at retirement, a lost decade, stagflation, large unexpected expenses), models your asset allocation and taxes, and ranks the levers that move your number most — including your debt.
It is a sharper estimate, not a foolproof answer. It still runs on the assumptions you type in, and it cannot see your actual accounts, tax lots, Social Security options, or healthcare costs. For that we build your plan in RightCapital when we work together.
Unlock the Advanced Edition free with a follow on social. Your numbers carry over automatically.
Go to the Advanced EditionYour number is a starting point — not a plan.
A real plan accounts for taxes, your actual allocation, Social Security timing, and paying down debt in the right order. When we work together we build yours in RightCapital, a full planning platform with far more thorough calculations than any web calculator — modeling your real accounts year by year and updating as your life changes. As a CDFA®, Daniella can help you turn this number into a roadmap, and often bring it within reach sooner than the math above suggests.
Book a consult with Populus Wealth