Money is the unit. Years are the point.
Well Spent
A free tool for projecting how long your money lasts — and what you could actually be spending.
The average person dies with about as much money as they had at 50.
Almost none of them planned it that way. They worked longer than they needed to and spent less than they could afford, year after year, to hold off a catastrophe that — for the overwhelming majority — was never going to arrive. That is not prudence. It is a forecasting error, and it costs a decade.
You can earn money back. You cannot earn back a year.
Well Spent is a free retirement projection tool. Tell it what your portfolio is worth today, how it is split between stocks and bonds, what you intend to spend each year, and how long the money has to last. It runs that plan through a century of real market history and shows you both halves of the answer: whether the money lasts, and what your standard of living looks like along the way.
What Well Spent does
- Projects from where you are
- Every complete retirement start year since 1928, run with your actual numbers, plus ten thousand simulated futures drawn from the same record. All of it in today's dollars — there is no nominal figure anywhere in the output.
- Shows spending, not just survival
- Two charts, the same size: what the portfolio does, and what you get to spend. A plan that survives by cutting your spending two thirds has not really survived, and Well Spent will not report it as though it had.
- Runs in your browser
- The simulation is computed on your own device, not on a server. You can use the entire calculator without an account and without telling anyone anything.
- Remembers, if you let it
- Signing in with Google is optional, and it does one job: it saves your plan so that next year you can record what actually happened and re-draw the projection from the new, shorter, better-informed present. Well Spent receives only your name, email address, and Google account ID — no access to Gmail, Drive, or anything else. See the privacy policy.
Well Spent is free, has no ads, and never connects to your bank or brokerage — you type the figures in yourself. It is a projection tool, not financial advice.
The rule is built from a single bad year
The 4% rule comes from finding the worst 30-year retirement in the historical record and asking what would have survived it. That one start year — 1966 — sets the budget for everyone. The median start year in the same record could have spent over 6% a year, and the best could have spent nearly 10%.
Most retirees end up richer than they started
Run a plain 4% plan through every 30-year window since 1928 and most of them finish with more real money than they began with, after a full retirement of spending. The typical outcome of following the safe rule is not safety. It is a large pile of unspent money and a decade of foregone life.
Nobody actually holds still for thirty years
The rule assumes you set a number at 65 and never look up again — through crashes, inflation, a hip replacement, a grandchild. Real people notice and adjust. A plan that models the adjusting is both more accurate and less frightening than one that pretends it away.
Working for someone else without knowing it
Here is the version that tends to land. For every year you worked but didn't spend what you earned that year, you were working — and someone else was getting paid for it. Your children, eventually, or a charity, or the market.
Sometimes that is exactly the intention, and it is a fine thing to intend. An inheritance you chose is a gift. But most of this money was never chosen. It accumulated because the plan was tuned for a disaster that didn't happen, and nobody re-tuned it when the disaster failed to show up. That is not a legacy. It is a rounding error with a beneficiary.
And notice which side of that trade is recoverable. Overspend a little and the mistake is fixable — you take less next year, the money is fungible, the balance comes back. Underspend and the years the money was standing in for are simply gone, and nothing in the balance you protected will buy one of them back. The two errors are not symmetrical. Almost every retirement tool is built as though they are.
Overspending is a real risk and this tool takes it seriously. It just refuses to let the fear of it quietly set your standard of living for thirty years.
What Well Spent does differently
It projects a cone of uncertainty from wherever you actually are today, using real market history rather than a smooth curve. It assumes your spending flexes, because yours will. And it expects you to come back: record what your portfolio actually did, and the years that were guesses become facts while the cone is redrawn from the new, shorter, better-informed present.
It will also tell you plainly when a plan is genuinely too aggressive. It just won't lead with that, because for most people reading this, it isn't the problem they have.