What Is the Journey Guide Retirement Calculator?
Journey Guide is an interactive retirement-income planning tool that models how your savings, Social Security, and guaranteed income (like annuities) cover your expenses through retirement, so you can see whether your plan lasts and where an income gap appears. Instead of giving you one static number, it runs thousands of market scenarios to show a success rate, then lets you test changes (such as adding an annuity or delaying Social Security) and watch the outcome update. Use the tool below to build your own plan, then read on to learn how to enter your information and read the results.
How to Use the Journey Guide Calculator
You can build a working plan in just a few minutes. Follow these three steps:
- Enter your information. Add your age, savings balances by account type (taxable, IRA, Roth, 401k), annual contributions, and your target annual spending in retirement.
- Model your income sources. Include your Social Security benefit (and your spouse’s, if applicable), any pension, and any guaranteed income from an annuity. Journey Guide pulls in current annuity pricing so the income figures are realistic.
- Review the outcome. Look at your success rate, the year-by-year income timeline, and whether spending is covered to your plan end age. Then test a change, such as adding guaranteed income, and watch the success rate move.
If you would like a walkthrough, the team also recorded a short Journey Guide video overview showing the tool in action.
What the Tool Does
Most basic retirement calculators stop at a single projection: enter a balance and a return, and they tell you a future value. Journey Guide goes further. It runs 5,000 Monte Carlo simulations, each using a different sequence of yearly returns, to show how often your plan succeeds across good and bad markets. That matters because the order of returns early in retirement, not just the average, decides whether your money lasts.
The tool also blends investments with guaranteed income in one view. You can layer Social Security, a pension, and an annuity on top of your portfolio and see the combined picture. Because current annuity pricing is built in, the income an annuity would actually buy is reflected directly, rather than estimated with a guess. If you want to understand how the guaranteed-income piece works first, our guide to a multi-year guaranteed annuity (MYGA) explains the simplest version: a fixed rate locked in for a set term.
What Inputs Matter Most
A plan is only as good as the numbers you feed it. A few inputs move the result more than the rest:
- Target spending. Your desired annual spending in the first year of retirement drives everything. Even a small change here can swing your success rate noticeably.
- Social Security timing. Claiming at 62 versus your full retirement age versus 70 changes your lifetime benefit substantially. The tool shows this trade-off instantly.
- Total assets and asset mix. Your combined balances and how they are allocated between stocks and bonds set both your growth potential and your risk.
- Guaranteed income. Pensions and annuity income are not exposed to market swings, so adding them tends to lift the success rate and shrink any gap.
If you are unsure when to file, our Social Security claiming calculator helps you compare claiming ages side by side before you plug a number into Journey Guide.
How to Read the Results
The headline number is your success rate: the share of simulated scenarios in which your plan funds your spending all the way to your plan end age. A higher percentage means more of the modeled markets left you with money to spare. There is no single magic threshold, but many planners look for a comfortable cushion rather than a coin-flip outcome.
Below the success rate, the income timeline breaks down where your money comes from each year, Social Security, pension, annuity, and portfolio withdrawals. If portfolio withdrawals are doing most of the heavy lifting in a down market, that is where sequence-of-returns risk shows up. The point where your projected income falls short of your spending goal is your income gap. Once you can see it, you can decide how to close it. Our retirement income gap calculator is a quick way to size that shortfall on its own.
How Annuities Fit a Retirement Plan
An annuity is a contract with an insurance company that can turn a lump sum into guaranteed income you cannot outlive. In a Journey Guide plan, that guaranteed income acts like a floor: it covers a baseline of essential expenses regardless of what the market does, which reduces how much you have to pull from your portfolio in bad years. That floor is exactly what tends to lift a success rate and close an income gap.
Annuities are not right for everyone, and the goal here is to model the trade-off honestly, not to push a product. If you want to see what a stream of guaranteed payments would look like for a given premium, our immediate annuity calculator estimates the monthly income a lump sum could buy today. When you are ready to compare designs, our team can run live quotes from 90+ top annuity companies. You can also browse the full annuity calculators hub for related tools. For an independent overview of how annuities work, the SEC’s investor education site offers a plain-language primer on annuities.
How Margaret tests her plan. Margaret is 63 with $600,000 in savings and a target of $55,000 a year in spending. Her Social Security benefit at full retirement age is about $28,000 a year. She enters all of this into Journey Guide and sees a success rate that looks shaky, because her portfolio has to cover roughly $27,000 a year, and a rough early market would force her to sell investments at a loss.
She then models adding a $150,000 income annuity that pays about $9,000 a year for life. Now her portfolio only needs to cover about $18,000 a year, and her guaranteed income (Social Security plus the annuity) covers about $37,000 of her $55,000 goal before she touches a single investment.
Margaret runs the plan again and watches her success rate climb and her income gap shrink. She has not bought anything yet. She has simply used the tool to see, in numbers, how a guaranteed floor changes the odds that her savings last to age 90.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Journey Guide calculator free to use?
Yes. The Journey Guide retirement calculator is free, with no cost and no obligation to buy anything. You can build a plan, test different scenarios, and review your results at no charge.
Do I have to enter personal information to use it?
You enter financial details like your age, savings balances, target spending, and expected Social Security so the tool can model a realistic plan, but you are in control of what you provide. You can start with estimates and refine them later, and you are never required to purchase a product to see your results.
How accurate is the Journey Guide calculator?
It is a planning tool, not a guarantee. Journey Guide uses Monte Carlo simulations and asset-class return assumptions to estimate a range of outcomes, and it builds in current annuity pricing for realistic income figures. The results are only as accurate as the inputs you provide, and actual markets, taxes, and personal circumstances will differ from any projection. Only the Social Security Administration can tell you your exact benefit.
Does the calculator recommend specific annuity products?
No. Journey Guide models how guaranteed income, including annuities, affects your plan, but it does not recommend a specific product or carrier. If you want to compare actual contracts, our team can run live quotes from 90+ top annuity companies so you can see real numbers before deciding anything.
Journey Guide results are hypothetical, do not reflect actual investment results, and are not guarantees of future performance. All projections rely on assumptions that may differ from your situation. This page is for educational purposes and is not investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Consult the appropriate professional before making decisions.
