Retirement+: What If Your Retirement Calculator Could Model Part-time Income, Spouse, and Longevity?
The retirement calculator formerly released as The RiskRadar Retirement Calculator is now Retirement+:
Retirement+ is a free, mobile friendly retirement planning tool that runs 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations and helps you explore how savings, income, expenses, market returns, inflation, and longevity can interact over a long retirement. You can use it without signing up, and signing in lets you save your plan and access it across devices.
Why Retirement+?
The RiskRadar name was originally used when we released the calculator, but it was always intended to become its own product and brand. The RiskRadar is also the name of a separate tool, so Retirement+ gives the calculator a clearer identity and a home of its own.
The original calculator is still available at https://retirement.theriskradar.com with its original theme. Both sites use the same backend. If you created a plan there, sign up there to save the data, then sign in at https://retirementplus.app and your saved data will be available here too.
Why create yet another retirement calculator?
Retirement planning rarely follows a single straight line. You might work part-time for a few years, claim Social Security later, change your spending as your priorities change, or plan for one spouse to outlive the other. Retirement+ is designed to make those scenarios easier to test.
You can include a spouse, add as many income and expense entries as you need, and give each one its own start and end dates. The calculator uses randomized market returns, inflation, income growth, and plan durations to show a range of possible outcomes rather than one fixed forecast. It can also use Social Security Administration life tables to estimate individualized plan end ages for each simulation.
The idea was inspired in part by Rich, Broke or Dead? by Engaging Data. That calculator made it easy to visualize early retirement success and longevity risk, and I kept wishing for a version that could use Monte Carlo simulations instead of historical periods, include a spouse, and handle more detailed income and expense planning.
So I built one. Retirement+ is intended to stay free, and you do not need to provide an email address just to run a simulation. Current age is the only required input because it lets the calculator estimate longevity using the SSA life tables.
Improvements since the original release
The calculator has continued to evolve since the first production announcement. Recent features and fixes include:
- Retirees can now enter a Social Security claiming age in the past, which is useful when modeling an existing retirement plan.
- A new Retirement+ dark theme with our gold branding.
- Sign-up and sign-in email now comes from
no-reply@retirementplus.app. Check your junk folder if you do not see it, and mark the message as not spam. - The sign-up wall has been removed. You can now view chart data without creating an account, and no email is required unless you want to save a plan.
- Fixed federal tax calculations for low incomes that were incorrectly applying the standard deduction and allowing negative taxes.
- Fixed a bug where chart data for one surviving spouse was missing for signed-out users.
- Fixed signed-out charts using the spouse's start age instead of your start age.
- Fixed incorrect spouse start ages on the Income and Expenses pages.
- Fixed signing up for the first time from the dashboard page showing a 100% result without line chart data.
- Corrected screenshot sizes reported in the web app manifest.
- Updated blog metadata and cover images so cover images can link to their source page.
- Fixed Open Graph and Twitter metadata images so links shared on social networks display their image correctly.
What we are exploring next
There is plenty more to build. A Social Security calculator is one planned addition: the goal is to let you bring in information from SSA.gov and use the future expected earnings already entered in Retirement+ rather than relying on a flawed assumed estimate that other tools generally use. We're not going to assume your retirment age and claiming age are the same. We want to give you the most accurate estimate possible.
We are also thinking about better ways to describe retirement outcomes. A 100% success rate is not the goal, and many advisors point out that retirement plans are not simply pass/fail systems. A future version might show the chance that an adjustment is needed, how much guaranteed income covers expenses, or how many simulations remain above a reduced income threshold rather than only looking at remaining net worth.
Spending is another area we want to make easier. You can already model Go-Go, Slow-Go, and No-Go phases or Detailed budgets yourself, but a built-in spending smile option and simple guardrail strategies would be more realistic and improve outcomes.
Try Retirement+
Visit https://retirementplus.app to build a plan and run Monte Carlo simulations with 10,000 scenarios for free. You can start without an account, add only the information you want to explore, and sign up if you want to save your plan for later adjustments.