What inputs can I change for my retirement goal?

You can change the following inputs in your plan and see how each affects your retirement outcome.

Adding a spouse: Add a spouse to your retirement plan so that you can plan for retirement together. If you add a spouse, we ask your spouse’s age and income so that we can estimate Social Security benefits (in addition to your own), contribution limits and adjust tax calculations appropriately.

Gender: We use this to estimate provide a suggestion on life expectancy conditional on gender.

Retirement age: Alter the age at which you retire. This will affect the amount of time you save for retirement and also your Social Security benefits. Retiring earlier generally means less time to save, less time for your investments to potentially increase in value, more retirement spending and possibly less Social Security benefits.

Life expectancy: Change the age at which you expect to stop needing retirement funds.

Annual income for you and your spouse: The gross annual income for you and your spouse before any taxes (eg. federal, state, Social Security, Medicare), benefit deductions (eg. FSA, HSA), other withholdings or pre-tax contributions to tax-advantaged accounts such as a Roth 401(k) or HSA.

Income expected in retirement aside from Social Security and investment withdrawals: The monthly value of all income you expect in retirement from sources other than Social Security and your savings. Examples are income from rental properties you own and income from defined benefit retirement plans offered by your current or previous employer.

Linked accounts: Link more accounts to your plan at any time and this will generate a more comprehensive retirement income estimate. You can also change the type of a linked account to better reflect its account type in case its classification is not correct. For example, the data we obtain from your account might not be sufficient to classify it properly, in which case it might be classified as Unknown type. You can change its type to better reflect its actual type and contribution limits.

Planned savings: Specify expected monthly contribution amounts toward your Wealthfront and other linked accounts. As you change this amount, Wealthfront provides recommendations on how to adjust your contributions across accounts. Planned savings grow with projected inflation in your plan.

Because of their tax benefits, we recommend you prioritize employer-sponsored plans like 401(k) and individual retirement accounts like Roth or Traditional IRA over a taxable personal savings account. If your employer does not offer a 401(k) plan or if you cannot use tax advantaged accounts, we recommend you use a taxable personal savings account.

Social Security: You can choose to include 100%, 50% or 0% of estimated social security benefits in your projection.

Target retirement spending: Amount your household is expected to spend in retirement, which we automatically estimate based on linked accounts and your age.

For more details on our methodology, please log into your account and review the Path disclosures.