Retirement & Financial Independence Planning

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn today's budget into a retirement budget, express it as a replacement ratio and find the gap your own savings must fill.
• Turn the yearly gap into a savings target, show it in future dollars and see what inflation does to a pension that is not indexed.
• Calculate your savings rate, your FI number and how many years it takes to reach it, and test what a 10% spending cut changes.
• Work out how much to save to reach the target, as a fixed monthly amount and as a yearly amount that grows with your pay.
• Calculate the employer match and compare the pot in a 0.1% index fund with a 1.1% managed fund after 30 years.
• Build a year-by-year drawdown table, find the age when the money runs out, and calculate the highest withdrawal that lasts 30 years.
• Run the same 15 yearly returns in two orders and see why bad years early in retirement can empty a portfolio that would otherwise last.
• Value a lifetime annuity quote against keeping the money invested: payout rate, present value of the payments and the age where the annuity breaks even.