published: April 2, 2021, 11:04 p.m.
This is a very basic retirement and financial freedom calculator that shows financial status for each week.
Click here to see the calendar
The format of this is based off of Tim Urban's Life Calender. A lot of retirement calculators I have seen will just give a binary result like "yes" you are financially on track to retire or "no" you will spend your remaining years in constant anxiety worrying about money. I think it comes more naturally for us to to think about finances and budgeting on a week by week basis so I wanted this calculator to visually capture that. Other calculators will just make an assume that the social institutions like social security will be behaving exactly the same when you are in retirement as they are today. That may be the case for older people but for someone who is young their retirement could be decades away and there is no reason that these institutions we created couldn't be changed in that time for bettor or for worse. I made the benefits received from these adjustable in the calculator to encourage you to turn the knobs on them and see how a policy change would financially affect you down the road. Retirement planning is very specific to the individual, but at the same time everybody else has to go through it too so i wanted to I tried to include an indication of how your entered info compares to other Americans to keep add that context.
Thee is a lot of complicated stuff that goes into financial planning that I didn't account for so I won't claim that this calculator is "accurate" or "reflects reality". One of the most glaring inaccuracies with it is that I have each row as containing 52 weeks, but because there 365 days in a year and that is not divisible by 52, so there is technically about 52.14 weeks in a year. Then when you factor in leap days it turns out that every couple of years a year will have 53 weeks. My calendar does not account for this so the week boxes do not evenly line up vertically. Since I count pay checks as coming every week this also means every few years your annually salary will be one week's pay check higher. I guess people get bonuses or might win the lottery every once and a while so the extra income shouldn't be that unrealistic. I also made the assumption for simplicity's sake that income, expenses, and benefits will all increase exactly in line with inflation so calculating inflation would not be needed. To factor in inflation on your total wealth I just instruct you to subtract inflation from the interest.I don't know how mathematically sound that is.
The web page with the calendar was made with React. I have never used React or any other Javascript frame work before, if you look closely you can even see that my calander is just a stretched out version of the Tic-Tac-Toe board from React's tutorial. I used this helpful blog post to figure out serving it from my Django project. All of the calculations are done in Python by the server.
I learned how to make the social security estimation calculation by using this great website ssa.tools. To create the percentile data of Americans I used the Consumer Expenditure Surveys data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2019 and got the net worth of people from this site.