Yesterday, I wrote about my first lesson in personal finance where I saw what the effect of savings rate had on retirement outcomes. I focused on the binary result of your net worth growing or shrinking after retirement.

I made a simple spreadsheet if you want to play with this yourself.

Here’s a link to a Google Sheet you can copy.

And here’s an Excel version.

To use it

1. Put your age in A2
2. Put your current net worth in I2 and K2
3. Put your current salary in I4 and K4

I would leave market return, inflation, etc alone and concentrate on seeing the effect of different savings rates. You can see the actual saving amounts in Columns D and F.

Of course, you should not take this as financial advice or even assume these spreadsheets are correct — check the math (let me know if you see an issue).

They are not meant to be accurate models, they are a very simple way of looking at it.

Remember, you can’t really control a lot of the variables on this spreadsheet except saving rate, which you have a lot of control over.

I’ll soon talk about income, which is the other big variable you can control. In this spreadsheet, I have assumed that you get raises slightly more than inflation.