I recently discussed how your savings rate can determine when you’ll be able to retire.  To go along with the table in that post, I developed the Saving Retirement Calculator below.  You can enter specifics for your situation to see when you might be able to retire.  Once you have an answer, you can copy the badge code and paste it into your webpage or blog to get a badge that looks like this:

Note that changing income will have no effect on the answer, unless you currently have a non-zero amount saved.  That is due to the fact that calculations are all made on a relative basis, i.e. if you are saving 10% (and thus living on 90%) 90% x 25 is the amount you’ll need to save, which does not need absolute current income to be  calculated.

Here’s the calculator:

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I’ve been reading a lot of books about normal and early retirement lately and I’m realizing how important it is to decide early when to retire.  This doesn’t mean that you should necessarily decide to retire young, just that you should make a plan for when you’d like to retire as soon as possible.  Anyone asking “When Can I Retire” would be well served to keep reading.

The main reason why you should decide early when to retire is that you’ll have the most options available to you.  While you may ultimately decide to retire at the “normal” age or work until the day you die, those default choices will probably not be what a majority of people choose to do.  If you’re young,

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