In our household, we often find ourselves in deep discussions about potential retirement dates and the lifestyle we’re willing to adopt post-retirement. Our decision-making process could be greatly enhanced by a tool that allows us to visualize various retirement scenarios based on adjustable annual spending limits so much so, I find myself taking key figures from the tool and creating this simple summary table in Excel.

What I envision (and have built) is a page that sits above all of the plans that provides a comprehensive table displaying different retirement ages per plan alongside corresponding to a customizable net worth ending balance (for instance $0 or $1m), tailored to various (customizable) annual spending brackets. I want to see what the retirement ages are for a lifestyle with a $25,000 annual budget compared to a $50,000 annual budget lifestyle. With this feature, it now becomes super easy to answer the question “How many ‘work days’ will that cost me? What if… we moved to a more expensive house… down-sized… bought a boat?”

An addition to this feature would be to integrate milestones with the feature. Use case: we are frugal with our spending during our working years (“lean years”), with a transition to a more lavish spending approach in our retirement years. Being able to model these changes would be game changing.