Retirement Planner - Google Sheets

Most people’s retirement plan is a vague sense that they’re “probably saving enough” — until they sit down and do the math. The problem is that the math is genuinely hard: you need to factor in decades of compound growth, inflation eating away at purchasing power, salary increases, Social Security, and what healthcare might cost twenty years from now. This Google Sheets retirement planner does all of that in one spreadsheet and tells you plainly whether your current trajectory works or not.

The Setup sheet lets you configure the key assumptions: retirement age, life expectancy, inflation rate, and expected investment return rates for both your working years and retirement years. Suggested defaults are pre-filled so you can start exploring immediately, but everything is editable. Want to model early retirement at 55? Or see how a more conservative return rate changes the picture? Just change the number and everything recalculates.

On the Current Situation sheet, you enter your present-day finances — income, existing savings, and how much you’re contributing. It supports both you and your spouse with separate profiles, so you can track individual incomes, savings pools, and each person’s share of expenses while still seeing the combined trajectory. Savings contributions can be a percentage of income or a fixed amount, and the planner automatically factors in salary increases and inflation over time.

The Retirement Goals sheet is where you plan the spending side. Enter expected income from Social Security, pensions, and any additional sources, then use the detailed retirement budget to estimate expenses across categories like healthcare, housing, travel, and hobbies. There are multiple options for how you calculate retirement expenses, so you can start with a ballpark or get precise.

The Dashboard gives you the bottom line: your projected savings at the start of retirement, what remains at the end, and a dynamic chart showing your savings and expenses plotted year by year. You’ll see exactly where the curves cross — or whether your savings comfortably outlast your expenses. Change any input in the planner, and the chart refreshes immediately.

For those who want to see the work, the Detail tab shows the full year-by-year calculations behind the projections. No hidden formulas — every number is there for you to inspect and verify.

Because it’s a Google Sheets template, you can access it from any device and share it with your partner for collaborative planning. It also includes the Excel version for offline use. No financial advisor fees, no app subscriptions, no sharing your data with a third party. Just a spreadsheet, your numbers, and an honest answer to the question you’ve been avoiding.