Checklist Before You Trust the Chart
Five questions every beginner should ask
Before you make a decision based on a retirement projection, walk through these questions. Each one catches a common error, and together they separate a projection worth acting on from one that quietly overstates your position.
Did you include every account?
Old employer plans are the most frequently forgotten. Check former jobs, old statements, and any account you opened and stopped funding.
Include IRAs, taxable brokerage balances earmarked for retirement, and vested employer contributions. Exclude your emergency fund and short-term savings.
This single omission is the most common reason a projection looks worse than reality, and fixing it costs nothing but an afternoon.
Is the return assumption defensible?
Does the rate match what you actually hold? A portfolio with a significant bond allocation should not be modeled at pure stock returns.
Did you subtract fund expenses? A 0.75% expense ratio turns 7% into 6.25% before anything else happens.
Would you defend the number to a skeptical friend? If not, lower it and see whether the plan still works.
- Include all retirement accounts, including old employer plans.
- Match the return assumption to your actual allocation, minus fees.
- Subtract Social Security and pensions from the income you need.
- Remember traditional account withdrawals are taxed as income.
- Adjust for inflation or plan in today's dollars consistently.
Did you account for other income?
Pull your Social Security estimate rather than guessing. For many households it covers a substantial share of the need.
Add any pension, rental income, or expected part-time work. Subtract all of it from your annual spending need before sizing the portfolio.
Doing this correctly frequently reduces the required balance by hundreds of thousands of dollars, which changes what contribution is necessary.
Have you handled taxes and inflation?
Traditional account balances are pre-tax. The spendable amount is lower, and the difference is not trivial at higher withdrawal levels.
Inflation means a future balance buys less than the same number today. Either inflate the target or plan with a real return, but do not mix the two.
These two adjustments usually move in opposite directions from each other and from the other income correction, which is why running all of them matters more than any single one.
Is the money invested the way you assumed?
A projection at 7% assumes the money is actually in something that could produce 7%. Log in and check what each account holds.
Cash sitting in a settlement fund after a rollover is the most common discovery, and it can go unnoticed for years while the projection assumes growth that is not happening.
Also check that you are not accidentally concentrated. A single company stock, often from an employer, is a different risk profile than a diversified fund.
This check takes fifteen minutes across all your accounts and catches the errors that no amount of careful modeling would reveal.
Is the plan robust to being wrong?
Rerun everything two percentage points lower on the return. If the plan collapses, it was depending on the market rather than on your savings rate.
Test an earlier retirement date as well, since a meaningful share of people stop working sooner than planned due to health or layoffs.
Check what happens if you contribute less for a few years, which is realistic during a career break or a period of caregiving.
A plan that survives all three of those tests is worth acting on. One that only works under ideal conditions needs adjusting now, while you still have time to adjust it.
Try these inputs
- Complete picture: all accounts, real rate, real timeline
- Stress test: same inputs two points lower on return
- Early exit: same inputs retiring three years sooner