Why this tool?

When I started looking for retirement calculators, I found they were either too simple, too complex, didn't provide the right inputs, or didn't answer the right questions. Simple calculators missed key aspects that could cause you to fall short in retirement including:

• Taxes
• Early withdrawal penalties

Health Insurance

Simple calculators also missed relationships between inputs, which requires you to remember to changing several inputs at a time to maintain the correct results. REST captures these relationships by allowing you to input how:

• Social security increases as you work longer
• In early retirement, health insurance goes up as a function of income (spending and withdrawal)
• A pension may increase if you work longer

Other calculators were too detailed, requiring far more data than I wanted to find or provide online. I wasn't interested in trying to find my annual income by year for my entire life. And I didn't want to supply that much data to an online company.

Others still made bad assumptions, such as assuming I would spend a percentage of my income during retirement, when really my spending is very different than my income because I save.

Others retirement calculators didn't answer the right questions. They didn't show me the pathways to my goals. How much more did I need to save each year? Or how many more years do I need to work?

REST was created to overcome these issues. It includes key aspects for:

• More reliable results
• Relationships between data so you can change any one input at a time to see how it changes the results
• A balanced level of relevant inputs that are stored on your computer
• Answers to the right questions, such as what pathways are there to meeting my goals.

I hope you find REST as useful as it has been to me.