Can You Trust Retirement Calculators?

NEW YORK, October 2, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Thinking about planning your retirement? Tools like Yieldstreet Retirement calculator can help you determine what you’ll need to save to maintain your current standard of living in retirement. The key is to make every effort to employ the most accurate data possible. 

What is a Retirement Calculator?

Retirement calculators allow you to explore different savings and investment scenarios to answer the question; “How much do I need to retire?” 

You’ll need to provide the following data to make that determination:

• Anticipated retirement age 
• Current annual income
• Anticipated post career income
• Currently accrued retirement dollars
• Post career employment plans
• Retirement location
• Investment style
• Estimated ongoing expenses

The calculators can then give you an idea of what you’ll need to save to meet your retirement goals. 

Flexibility is Key to Accuracy

Run a search for “retirement calculator” or “how much do I need to retire?” and you’ll get many hundreds of pages of results. However, all calculators are not created equally. In fact, some are too simple to be effective at all. 

The best calculators offer the capability of incorporating a wide variety of factors, so they can be as accurate as possible. This gives them the flexibility to compare a broader assortment of circumstances, which can provide a more complete picture.

In other words, a thorough calculator is important to getting actionable results. 

Plan For The Unexpected

Most calculators assume a 6% annual rate of return on investments. While that is a reasonable figure, it’s important to remember that’s an average of good and bad years. The data will be skewed if an extended run of bad years should occur just before you need to begin withdrawals. 

Simply put, your retirement income could be reduced substantially if you hit a lingering period of negative returns just before you retire. Because calculators cannot predict this, you’ll also need to implement diversification of your retirement portfolio. 

Alternative Investments and Portfolio Diversification

Traditional portfolio asset allocation envisages a 60% public stock and 40% fixed income allocation. However, a more balanced 60/20/20 or 50/30/20 split, incorporating alternative assets, may make a portfolio less sensitive to public market short-term swings. 

Real estate, private equity, venture capital, digital assets, precious metals and collectibles are among the asset classes deemed alternative investments. Traditionally accessible only to accredited investors and institutions buying in at very high minimums, Yieldstreet has opened a number of carefully curated alternative investment strategies in these areas to all investors.

Learn more about the ways Yieldstreet can help diversify and grow portfolios.

In Summary

So, can you trust retirement calculators? Yes, as long as you feed them the most accurate information possible. With this in mind, it is important to employ the most precise figures you can get. It is also prudent to revisit the numbers from time to time to ensure you remain on track as events unfold, as well as diversify your holdings to provide a measure of protection from potential volatility. 

Source: Yieldstreet