My Online Retirement Calculator

Well, I’ve been retired for 3 months and looks like I’ve landed a contract starting next week.

I’ve been working on an online calculator and it’s now in a reasonable state. It’s lacking a lot of features that I would like, but I’ve run out of time for the moment. If you have a look, I think you’ll agree it has a lot more features than other available Australian online calculators already. Putting in this additional flexibility has been quite time consuming, and adding features has the potential to as well!

Rather than putting the whole project on ice, and waiting until it is perfect (i.e. never!), I’ve decided to put it out there. Some important caveats are that this calculator is really for people approaching retirement and wanting to find out when is the best time to retire. It’s also been developed under Google Chrome desktop, and this is the best means of running it (I don’t have the resources to do extensive testing!). The program is a BETA version and it’s also my first Javascript program!. If you spot any issues, please let me know!

I have found the existing calculators lacked precision, so have made this one more exact (e.g. it asks you the day you intend to retire, your birthday etc). Don’t be too put off with this, as you can change them later with sliders in the main page. You can also see how your assets change, and there is a numeric table which accompanies the graph. In addition, there is a “Mortality” graph which shows you the probability that you (and your partner if relevant) will be alive.

I’m not going to dwell on the calculator, other than to show, once again, how it relates to our situation!

Here is the graph showing expenditure by age. I assume we will live to 90, and we sell the investment property around September 2040. I’m already seeing a benefit here because previously my spreadsheets did not allow the sale of the investment property. Selling it makes sense as it can significantly increase the spend levels.

Note that when we sell the investment property, the funds go to cash. Later versions will allow this to go into another asset class. The same with if your super exceeds the 1.6M cap when you retire; excess will go into cash rather than, for example, remaining in the accumulation account or going into an ETF or similar.

And here is the graph showing the financial assets.

Here is the graph showing the mortality information.

Have a go and if you have any feedback, please let me know.