Calculators

You reach faster if you can save a bit more by trimming your living costs Sanjib Saha 21 Dec 2025 Last week I wrote about Financial Freedom, with a simple tool to map out your journey. Here is a companion tool using the same methodology to show how dialing your lifestyle cost up or down changes your path. Use the tool if your income covers your entire living costs even after saving a meaningful amount for the future. The previous post asserts: "The most reliable way to accelerate your journey to financial freedom is to maintain a high savings rate…

Are you decades away from your Financial Freedom, or is it just around the corner? See for yourself. Sanjib Saha 14 Dec 2025 Wouldn’t it be nice if our financial habits could get us to a place where we’d no longer need any ongoing income to sustain our lifestyle going forward? That’s what Financial Freedom means. Once you’re there, you can choose to keep working and adding to your wealth, but you don’t have to. How to get there sooner rather than later? Earn a high income? Live a frugal lifestyle? Chase market-beating investment return? What if the answer is:…

Inflation’s Hidden and Insidious Attack on the Purchasing Power of Americans Sanjib Saha 17 Nov 2025 This interactivechart uses the CPI-U data published by US Bureau of Labor Statistics to show the effect of inflation over time. Pick an amount for any year and see how much money was needed on a different year to maintain the same living standard. Keep in mind that the estimates are approximate, and every household has a different breakdown of their lifestyle expenses. Your mileage may vary. Still, you can use this chart to get rough answers to questions like: How much do I…

Sanjib Saha 19 March 2023 Are you thinking of dialing down at work, but worried about not having enough in retirement if you stop saving? Depending on how much you've saved already and how long your investments can grow untapped, you might get there sooner than you think. Instead of guessing, why don't you get a clearer picture by doing the math with our simple calculator? Let's say that you've saved some money for retirement and plan to add to it regularly in future years. Let's also say that you don't plan to retire before you're 65 years old. "Retire…

Sanjib Saha 27 November 2022 I wrote about the true damage caused by misspending. Let’s look at the other side of the same coin. Each dollar that you managed to cut back from your expenses goes a lot further than you think. How? Because retirement dollars can be cheap to buy when you’re many years away from it. You get a large discount –the time value of money. But if are able to stop a recurring expense – be it the annual gym payments because you chose to pick up health activities that you can do yourself, or the monthly…

Sanjib Saha 24 November 2022 Each dollar we misspend in our working years is a raid on our retirement bank. Sounds dramatic? I guess so. But it’s true, nonetheless. We just don’t think of it that way. Why? Because we aren’t that good in thinking long-term and picturing ourselves in our inevitable life-stage called retirement. “It’s many years from now, and we’ll cross the bridge when we get there.” This shortsightedness, alas, can be costly if we aren’t saving a good chunk of our income towards retirement. Realistically, most of us are going to earn only a limited amount of…