3. Use retirement calculators — with caution
By your 50s, you should have a realistic idea of what your income will be in retirement. Online retirement calculators are a good, if inexact, way to estimate the monthly or annual income you’ll receive from savings and other sources.
Calculators vary a great deal in their accuracy, but they can be useful for setting goals and exposing gaps between your likely income and expenses in retirement. The more detailed data a calculator collects, the more likely its results will be useful for you.
Two problems with calculators: They require you to make impossible guesses about the future rate of return on your investments, and sometimes they fail to accurately account for taxes. Because of these issues, it’s a good idea to play around with several different calculators to see how your results can vary.
