Best retirement planning tools in 2024

The Retirement Planner from Empower is free to use and, in my opinion, is the best one available today — free or paid. The platform offers many other features, as well.

The Empower Retirement Planner includes: Analysis of your actual savings and spending, MonteCarlo simulation, "what-if" scenarios, new home simulation, college education simulation, accounts for large expenses

Betterment is one of our favorite robo-advisor services. More than just helping you do some hands-off investing, the service takes a holistic look at your financial picture to help you reach specific goals. So, of course, Betterment would have a useful retirement calculator.

Once you open a Betterment account, you can use this free tool. From there, all you have to do is input your age, your household income (before taxes), how much you have saved for retirement already, and the amount your household is saving for retirement each year. The calculator will then give you an estimate of how much you'll be able to spend per year.

If you're looking for a quick picture of how much you need to save for retirement, Stash's retirement accounts calculate your age, your intended retirement age, your pre-tax income, and how much you've saved and are saving to give you a snapshot of how much you'll need and how much you're on track to have.

Stash's retirement account calculations are useful for those who want a more thorough view so you can choose to incorporate several assumptions into the mix. These include how much of your current income you expect to need in retirement, your investment rate of return, life expectancy, and inflation. By making informed estimates here, you'll get a much better idea of where you stand when it comes to retirement savings.

Get started with Stash with as little as $5 to start, so it's one of the best investing apps for beginners. And if you go for the free Retirement Calculator, you might end up staying for the whole service.

CountAbout is a handy budgeting and personal finance tool. While it's mostly focused on monthly budgets and helping you monitor your spending, they also have a FIRE widget to help you plan for retirement. This retirement planning tool isn't free however, but its basic account costs $9.99 a year.

Short for Financial Independence and Early Retirement, FIRE tools help you track how close you are to retirement. CountAbout's FIRE widget that tracks your monthly expenses along with any potential passive income and plots them over time.

So, for example, if you are mostly invested in stocks, it will show the potential amount you have versus your expenses so you will know when you're financially independent. You can also analyze your future finances by setting your retirement withdrawal rate and calculate your passive income potential from the size of your assets.

With a stellar app and comprehensive features, Fidelity is one of our top-ranked online brokers. But did you know that its website also offers a free calculator you can use to get onto the right road to retirement?

The myPlan Snapshot may not be as comprehensive as Empower's Retirement Planner, but it can give you a quick, down-and-dirty glimpse at your financial future. All you need to do is enter your age, annual savings, annual income, and the value of your total investment portfolio. Fidelity will then create a visual representation of your projected assets in future dollars. You don't need to sign up to Fidelity to use the calculator, but if you decide to become a customer — or if you're one already — you can use the data to create a more comprehensive retirement investing plan.

Boldin is designed to help ease your anxiety around retirement planning. The platform helps you build a customized retirement plan and make sure that you're on track to retire comfortably.

Boldin specializes in offering affordable retirement planning tools, educational content, and a community of like-minded investors.

Their free plan helps you see where you stand financially and if you're financially prepared for retirement. With their PlannerPlus Plan ($120 per year) you can also create a budget, link your accounts, get a detailed tax analysis, find the best withdrawal strategies, and more. A 14-day free trial is included with this plan. Finally, the Boldin Advisors Plan ($1,650 on average) allows you to collaborate with a Certified Financial Planner™ professional and gain access to fee-only fiduciary expertise.

Vanguard is another stock broker, and its collection of mutual funds and ETFs is stellar. It also has a free retirement calculator you can use to calculate how long your nest egg will last into retirement.

The Vanguard Retirement Nest Egg Calculator requires only four inputs: number of years your savings should last, current savings balance and yearly spending, savings allocation.

Since it's not going as in-depth into your financial picture as, say, Empower does, you won't get quite as comprehensive a result. You'll get a graph that tells you how long your savings will last. Still, it's a great quick snapshot if you need a good idea of whether or not you're on the right track.

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