Retirement Planner Spreadsheet for Excel

The powerful Retirement Planner for Microsoft Excel estimates the total value of your investments into the future. You can experiment with different growth rate scenarios and project outcomes in real-time.

Benefits of the Retirement Planner for Microsoft Excel include:

• Quick & easy setup (only a handful of inputs are required)
• Presents forecast by year in both chart and table formats
• Projects when you will reach a your Portfolio Goal
• Responsive scenario planning with instantaneous updates to plan changes
• Renders multiple growth rate scenarios
• Integrates with your existing account balances and Cash Flow Forecast
• Can model changing risk profile

Assumptions

The sheet makes many compounding assumptions about the future— listed in the Tiller Community post for the original Google Sheets template — and thereby should only be used as a directional model. These assumptions include:

• The set investment growth rate is the exact amount your investment will gain each year. This is highly unlikely to be true for every year. But in the long-run, these values can be estimated.
• This sheet doesn’t take taxes into account. There are many rates rates to consider and different type of investments (IRA’s, Roth IRA, non-retirement investments with different cost basis, etc) have different tax treatments. You can estimate tax expenses as expenses on the Cash Flow Forecast sheet and/or adjust the blended growth rate to account for taxes.
• The sheet assumes that any extra gain you have at the end of the year will be reinvested back into your investment total. Similarly, any loss you have at the end of the year will reduce the value of your investments.

All these numbers are future projections and estimates.

The Retirement Planner Spreadsheet for Excel works in combination with the Cash Flow Forecast sheet

Any expected future income or expenses (e.g. college expenses for a child, a home or car purchase, etc) should first be entered on the Cash Flow Forecast sheet for Excel.

The Retirement Planner uses your cash flow information from the Cash Flow Forecast sheet then adds Investments totals, Investment Growth, Withdrawal rates, and Transfers/Adjustments to the forecast.

Installing the Retirement Planner Spreadsheet for Excel

1. Download the Retirement Planner (Excel) Template
2. Follow this guide to copy the downloaded template into your Excel workbook and to connect the formula references to your local workbook data.

Using the Retirement Planner Spreadsheet for Excel

The Retirement Planner Template for Excel attempts to provide close to full parity with the original version for Google Sheets.

As noted above, this template should be used with the corresponding Cash Flow Template for Excel.

Please refer to the original Tiller Community thread for the Google Sheets version of this template for detailed usage instructions. When I first started using the sheet, I found it very intuitive. Note that some cell references have slightly changed from the Google Sheets version.

Excel Instructions

Dynamic Charts

You can enhance the chart interactivity by making it responsive to the number of years you enter in the Cash Flow Forecast sheet or manually in this sheet with just a few clicks, or a quick macro.

Manual configuration:

1. Right-click on the chart and select “Select Data”
2. Under Legend Entries (Series), select each series and click “Edit” and change the formulas:
   • Investments End of Year → ='Retirement Planner'!RetirementPlannerChartInvestments
   • Upper Range Growth → ='Retirement Planner'!RetirementPlannerChartUpperRange
   • Lower Range Growth → ='Retirement Planner'!RetirementPlannerLowerRange
   • Portfolio Goal → ='Retirement Planner'!RetirementPlannerLowerRange
3. In the Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels, click “Edit” and change the formula to ='Retirement Planner'!RetirementPlannerChartYears

Alternative automated configuration:
If you’re comfortable with macros, you can also copy this simple macro as a new module into your workbook, run it once, and then remove the module it so you can continue saving your workbook as an .xlsx: VBA Macro

Explanation: The sheet has “Named Ranges” for the series data, which point to dynamic arrays that respond to the number of years in the Cash Flow Forecast Sheet or this sheet. However, when copying or moving a sheet, Excel removes Named Ranges from a chart’s definition, replacing them with absolute ranges. It’s an unfortunate limitation of Excel that requires a few manual steps each time you copy the sheet.

Ask questions and leave feedback

This template for Excel has an active thread here in the Tiller Community.