Free Calculator calculates Your Nest Egg Results from 2000 to 2007

This is the first post on this blog. The purpose of the blog is to find and review the many different retirement calculators on the Internet.

Some of the calculators take a responsible approach and point out their limitations. But many others are merely used to attract site visitors and have no real value.

All calculators should be thoroughly researched before using the results to plan your retirement. Failure to do this may well leave too much life at the end of the money!

There is a saying my Margaret Mead that I think is very relevant here;

“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.” Margaret Mead

It is my aim with this blog to try to live up to the meaning of that quote.

I thought I might start the ball rolling with a small purpose built retirement calculator I creating in Excel to find out how a retirement nest egg might have performed from 2000 to 2007. During this period we had the Dotcom crash with the S&P 500 losing 40% of its value by 2003 and then we had the bull market run up from 2003 to late 2007. I wondered what the result might be on a $1M nest egg for a Baby Boomer retiring on 1st January 2000.

I used actual historical S&P 500 index returns not the long-term market averages used by many in the financial planning industry. I worked on four different scenarios the result of one are shown below:

Here is the chart of all four showing how they performed against the S&P 500 Index:

You can download 30 page report of my findings and the excel spreadsheet I used here; What if You Retired in 2000, or click on the image of the report at the top of this blog.

You can use the spreadsheet yourself and insert your own figures if you wish. It uses real historical data not averages. It is very easy to use to.

You can also find a lot of FREE information on how to protect your nest egg in retirement on my Blog, Protect Your Nest Egg in Retirement

Please take a look and let me know what you think.