Crunching your retirement numbers

Many financial web sites offer an online retirement calculator to use in experimenting with retirement strategies. The typical retirement planning calculator will want to know several things in order to give you reasonable results, such as your current savings balance, annual needed retirement income, the expected rate of return on your investment portfolio (for stocks or mutual funds you can find this in a prospectus), other income you may have available for retirement such as Social Security, the inflation rate, your current age, your tax bracket, and the age at which you plan to retire. Pulling together these number can be a useful exercise in itself because it prompts you to review and perhaps re-evaluate your current strategy before you even touch a retirement income calculator.