Retirement Calculator by ETFMathGuy

Seasons greetings to all! We hope this post finds you well. We are happy to introduce a new and evolving feature available to ETFMathGuy subscribers: a new Retirement Calculator!

Retirement Calculator

You may have noticed a new menu option when logging into ETFMathGuy.com labeled “Retirement Calculator”. Please be sure to log-in to our site to access this interactive calculator. If you don’t recall your password, it can be reset here. You also may need to refresh the page containing the calculator.

Another Retirement Calculator?

There are certainly many retirement calculators available online, either free, as part of your brokerage account, or by subscription. I have been using the Fidelity Retirement Income planner for some time, which is free to Fidelity account holders. While there are similarities between our retirement calculator and others, here are a few of the features our retirement income planner includes.

1. We assume qualified stock dividends and non-qualified bond dividends. Some planning tools tax stock and bond dividends the same. So, we made the assumption that stock and bond investments in a taxable brokerage account hold ETFs like the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (ticker IVV) and the iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF (ticker AGG).
2. We assume taxable account withdrawals trigger only long-term capital gains taxes. Some planning tools include all taxable account withdrawals as part of ordinary income, which only occurs for capital gains in investments held for less than one year.
3. We model capital gains taxes and qualified dividends at either the 0%, 15% and 20% rates, with income levels based on taxable income for the current tax year. Some planning tools either exclude taxation of these sources of retirement income, or tax them all at the 15% rate.

Questions or feature requests

We encourage you to try out our new calculator, which also provides more detailed information on how it models retirement income and taxes. We also would love to hear about features you would like to be included in the calculator as its development continues.

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