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Retirement Figures

How Retirement Figures is different

Just some of the reasons Retirement Figures makes planning simpler and better:

01Realistic by default

Your projection reflects real markets, not a smooth line

The tidy, ever-rising line most tools draw is the best case dressed up as the expected case. Yours reflects the bumps real markets actually deliver.

Retirement Figures Your default projection is the middle outcome drawn from thousands of simulated market futures, so it already carries the ups, downs, and bad-timing risk real markets produce. You can even lay the old smooth "steady return" line right over it - the space between the two is exactly the optimism a straight-line projection bakes in. Want the simple version for a quick gut check? It is one click away, just not your default.
Most other tools Many planners draw one smooth line at your average return, every year, forever. It looks like certainty, but it quietly leaves out volatility drag and sequence-of-returns risk - the two things most likely to derail a real retirement - so it consistently paints a rosier picture than markets deliver.
Read more: why your projection shouldn't be a straight line
02Funded ratio

See whether you are funded, not just likely to be

A chance-of-success percentage tells you how often a plan survived. It does not tell you whether the money is actually there. Those are different questions, and you deserve an answer to both.

Retirement Figures Your dashboard shows a funded ratio beside your net worth: everything paying for your retirement - portfolio, Social Security, pensions, future property sales - measured in today's dollars against everything it owes, taxes included. No simulation and no randomness, so it moves smoothly with your assumptions rather than jumping around. Mark how much of each expense is essential and you get two answers: whether your essentials are covered, and whether your full lifestyle is.
Most other tools A single probability of success, offered as the whole answer. It is a genuinely useful number, but on its own it blurs two very different problems - not having enough, and having enough but being broken by bad timing - and it can swing on assumptions in ways that are hard to read.
Read more: what a chance-of-success score cannot tell you
03Ease of use

Find everything where you expect it, even months later

Powerful planning that still feels obvious - everything is where you expect it to be.

Retirement Figures A clean, consistent layout where each input lives where you would look for it. Come back months later and you will not have to relearn anything - it just works the way you remember.
Most other tools Cluttered screens, buried settings, and steep learning curves where stepping away for a few months means figuring it all out again.
04Multiple plans

Create, compare, and reconcile multiple plans

Create multiple plans, switch between them instantly, and see exactly how they differ - something most other planners cannot do at all.

Retirement Figures Create a new plan or duplicate an existing one in a click, switch between them from anywhere, and compare results side by side. Plan Compare shows you precisely which inputs differ between two plans, field by field - and its Results view runs both plans to show what those differences actually cost, breaking the gap in ending balances down by cash-flow source. Reconcile any difference in one step.
Most other tools Some tools support multiple plans, but they are usually clunky and difficult to work with - and even then there is rarely a real way to compare plans, let alone see what actually changed between them or what it cost.
Results: the effect on ending balance
Changes: which fields differ
05Sharing

Share a plan with a spouse, an advisor, or a parent

Give the people in your retirement - or the person whose retirement you are helping with - their own way in to the plan, without buying them a second subscription.

Retirement Figures Share any plan by email. They open it in their own free account and see exactly what you see, with every Plus feature intact no matter what they pay - and nothing of yours beyond that one plan. If they have never heard of us, invite them anyway: the link sets up a free account with the plan already waiting. It works in the other direction too, so an adult child looking after a parent's finances can be given access without anyone handing over a password.
Most other tools Sharing tends to be an afterthought: export a PDF that is stale the moment you change an assumption, hand over your own login, or pay for a second seat. None of those give the other person a live view they can actually work with.
06Optimizers

Optimizers that find your best moves

Stop guessing - let built-in optimizers search for the choices that maximize your plan.

Retirement Figures Let the built-in optimizers find the best Social Security claiming age, pension options, Roth conversions, and spending levels - not in isolation but as part of your entire plan - and all backed by clear comparisons that make the tradeoffs easy to see.
Most other tools A single projection and a basic chart or two, leaving you to guess at your optimal claiming ages, pension elections, and how long your money really needs to last.
07Stress testing

Stress-test your plan without changing it

See how your plan holds up against the things that could go wrong - without ever touching your actual plan.

Retirement Figures Model what-ifs in seconds and even stack multiple scenarios at once, like a market crash right after you retire combined with a Social Security cut in 2032, so you can see the combined impact on your plan.
Most other tools Some planners make you change your actual plan to test a scenario, and offer no way to easily test some scenarios like a Social Security cut.
08Time Machine

Replay your plan through 1966, 1929, or any year on record

An average of history is not a thing anyone lived through. Retiring in 1966 meant a decade of inflation before any recovery; retiring in 1982 meant the opposite.

Retirement Figures Pick a real starting year and your plan runs on the returns and inflation that actually followed it, from 1872 to 2025 - 154 years, including the deflations and the double-digit inflation the modern record barely contains. Then sweep every starting year at once: each one is colored by how much room it had left, not merely by whether it survived, so a plan that scraped through 1966 looks different from one that sailed through it. When some years break the plan, it works out the smallest change in spending that would have carried you through them, and names the year that sets the number.
Most other tools Most planners cannot replay a specific historical sequence at all - the closest they offer is an average return, which flattens exactly the ordering that decides a retirement. A few do let you scrub a starting year, the same way ours does. Where they stop is one year at a time: no way to ask what every starting year on record would have done to this plan, how much room each one left, or what it would have taken to come through the ones that failed.
Read more: how Time Machine works
09Relocation

Move to another state or country, and see what changes

Where you live drives your taxes, your costs, and your healthcare - and it changes from a specific year forward, not from day one.

Retirement Figures Schedule a move at any age, to any US state or any of 195 countries, and state tax is recalculated for the years you actually live there. Expenses are tagged to a place, so your old and new costs coexist in one plan and a move-and-return works. For six international destinations, Passport builds the whole plan for you: local costs by category, private insurance, and what happens to Medicare.
Most other tools In most planners your state is a single field applied to the entire projection, with no way to say you move in 2031. There is nothing to hand-edit around, so a move gets modeled as if you had always lived there, applying the destination's taxes, costs, and healthcare to decades you never spent there.
Read more: why most planners cannot model a move at all
10Verified math

We check our tax math against an independent engine

Every planner says its tax calculations are accurate (assuming they do any tax calculations at all). Ours are checked against an independent engine we did not write, and we publish the results.

Retirement Figures Our federal tax calculations match PolicyEngine US - an open-source model used for policy research - to within one dollar across a suite of retirement scenarios built around Social Security thresholds, Roth conversions, capital gains, and RMDs.
Most other tools Accuracy is asserted rather than demonstrated. With no published comparison against an independent reference, you are asked to trust a black box with the most consequential math in your plan.
See how we validate the tax engine
11Your data

Use it with no account, or sync to the cloud

You decide where your plan lives, and you can get the full tool without ever creating an account.

Retirement Figures Start with no account at all and your plan stays private in your browser, right on your device. Want to use it on more than one device? Create a free account with email or Google to sync your plans to the cloud. You can also turn on end-to-end encryption, protecting your synced plans with a passphrase only you hold. Plus is available in either mode - it unlocks features, it does not dictate how you store your data.
Most other tools Most planners force you into one or the other: nearly all require an account and keep your data on their servers, while the rare local-only app gives you no way to sync across devices. Either way you do not get to choose, and few give you a way to encrypt your data with a key only you hold.
12Documentation

Look up how any feature or number works

You should never be left guessing how a feature works or how a result is calculated.

Retirement Figures A searchable help center provides thorough, plain-English documentation for every feature. Most pages have a direct link to its help page.
Most other tools Sparse help pages, vague tooltips, or no documentation at all, leaving you to guess at how everything works.

See the difference in your own plan

Build a baseline plan in minutes - no email, no credit card - and explore the tradeoffs other tools never surface.

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