Find the earliest age you can actually stop working.

How does the early retirement planner work?

Four simple steps, in order.

1. Starting balances come from your accounts. Cash, brokerage, retirement accounts, and debts, either synced through Plaid or typed in by hand.
2. Savings is derived, not entered. What you actually save each month falls out of your income and your categorized spending. If your real savings rate is 31%, we use that. You'd be surprised how few calculators actually do this.
3. Life events go on the timeline. A house down payment, a kid, a few part-time years, an inheritance, Social Security starting at 62, a pension. All of these events go on a timeline you can see visually and in a way where the simulation respects the timing and impact of each event.
4. The simulation searches for the earliest age that holds. For a candidate retirement age it runs 500 paths through your plan-through age (typically life expectancy), each path stitched from contiguous blocks of real annual returns from 1928 so the crashes and recoveries stay in their original order. A candidate age passes when the portfolio survives in at least 85% of paths. This matches up with what financial planners often consider safe to plan around.

Commit to the plan, then find out if you hold to it

Lots of retirement calculators exist, many for free. The issue is it's then on you to come back to that calculator and see whether your plan is still on track. This is where Bonsave Projection commitments come into play.

Commit to a plan and Bonsave freezes the assumptions behind it, then measures your real net worth against the path that plan expected. The answer comes back to you in daily insights, and whenever you interact with the chat feature in Bonsave.

You may wake up one morning to an insight telling you you're ahead of your plan by 13,000 dollars, which you can then use to make informed decisions about your spending or saving for that month. You may be asking chat if you can afford to take a vacation next month, and it will give you an answer based on your committed plan rather than a generic rule of thumb.

Say goodbye to wondering whether you're on track; Bonsave keeps you informed every step of the way.

What the 4% rule leaves out

If you're familiar with retirement planning, you've probably heard of the 4% rule. If not, it's a rough guideline suggesting that you can withdraw 4% of your retirement savings annually without running out of money too soon.

The 4% rule takes your annual spending, multiplies by 25, and hands you a target. Spend $80,000, you need $2 million. It is a fine back-of-the-envelope figure, but too many people treat it as gospel rather than a rough estimate.

The problem is what the multiple doesn't know. It does not know how long your retirement runs, and 25x came out of a study of 30-year retirements. If you want to retire early, say at 45, you are asking a 30-year answer to cover potentially 50 years. It also doesn't know the order of your returns, and the order is where risk creeps in: a 40% drawdown in your first two years forces you to sell shares that never come back for you, and no amount of good average return repairs that. It doesn't know you're planning on taking out Social Security at 62 instead of the normal 65, that your spending drops when your mortgage ends at 50, or that you plan to work part-time from 40-45.

This is why Bonsave runs simulations. It simulates the drawdown, so the number you need is whatever the simulation says survives, given your horizon and the market sequences it tested.

Why not just build a spreadsheet?

Build the spreadsheet. Seriously. I built mine at 22 and it taught me more about my money than any app has. If you enjoy it, nothing here replaces that.

What a spreadsheet is bad at is not the math. It's the chores around the math. Every month you re-key balances from six institutions, and maybe you skip a month, now the model goes stale. The second is the simulation itself. A single growth-rate column is a straight line, and the whole point of sequence risk is that the line is a lie. Calculating it properly means running hundreds of resampled return paths against your monthly cash flows, which is a whole bunch of work in Google Sheets you don't need.

Why another subscription?

Because the alternatives are worse for you, not because $7 a month is nothing. A free app is paid for by selling your transaction data or by selling you a 1% advisory relationship, and 1% of a $1M portfolio is $10,000 a year. Bonsave costs $7 a month for Pro after a 14-day free trial. There is no free tier and I am not going to pretend there is one. We want to serve the customers who find value in our product.

What it costs

* Fair use limits apply. MCP access is limited to 500 requests/hour, and chat has a monthly message allowance you can track in your account settings. Learn about MCP →

Projections is included in both plans. There is no free tier, and cancelling inside the trial costs you nothing.

Common questions