Financial planning calculations

laney75

What tools/estimates/calculators do you use to plan your retirement and college savings plans?  We have our savings with a financial planner at Smith Barney.  So obviously he is of some assistance.  But he is not the one who determines, ultimately, how much money we want to live on when we are retired, or how much college we want to fund.  Know what I mean? 

Are there online tools you've used?  Books?  Something else?  Right now we are just sort of blindly saving toward both of these goals in various investment accounts, but I want to have hard numbers to work toward and we haven't done that yet.

Please share.

MainelyFoolish

savingforcollege.com is very helpful for college savings calculations.

For retirement, there are dozens of calculators available online and they can give widely different answers.  You can try a few and see if you can get a ballpark estimate if you feel that will help you meet your goals.

For me, I'm relying on saving 15% of our income towards retirement.  Both DH and I have been savings since our early 20s and we don't plan to retire early, so that amount of money (according to every calculator I've ever tried) should be able to allow us to live a similar or slightly better lifestyle in retirement.  If you started saving later or want to retire early, you'll probably need to save more than 15%. 

laney75

Thanks for the link, I will check that out.

We do also save 15%.  Well more, but not all of that is earmarked for retirement.  I have major fears of running out of money to retire so that is why I feel like I want to work toward a concrete number.  I will look up some more calculators online though.

 

WhitePicketFence

I second using www.savingfor college.com for education savings. It's a great resource.

As for retirement, I've used various calculators in the past to monitor our progress. We more or less decided upon a dollar amount that we would like to have saved by the time we want to retire (considering that we'd like to retire early and the type of lifestyle we hope to have at that point) and worked backwards from there.

laney75

WhitePicketFence:

I second using www.savingfor college.com for education savings. It's a great resource.

As for retirement, I've used various calculators in the past to monitor our progress. We more or less decided upon a dollar amount that we would like to have saved by the time we want to retire (considering that we'd like to retire early and the type of lifestyle we hope to have at that point) and worked backwards from there.

This is what I hope to do.  We have both always saved in our 401ks, etc since we were in our early 20s.  However, I am pretty sure we need to be saving more and I think my husband has sort of deluded himself as to how much we will really need.  We have a massive mortgage and live in a very HCOL area and it all just costs a lot.  We'd have to downgrade to a smaller house in a cheaper area to afford to retire on what we are saving now.  Which we will probably do regardless but it is something we need to be cognizant of.  I don't like the "stick your head in the sand" approach.  Ugh.