Planning for retirement can feel overwhelming — how much you’ll need, when you can realistically stop working, how to cover the unexpected. The good news: a handful of free, well-built online tools can turn that guesswork into a real answer in a matter of minutes. Here are three worth trying.
1. Empower’s Retirement Planner
Empower (formerly Personal Capital) offers a free retirement planning tool that links directly to your real accounts — 401(k), IRA, brokerage, and bank — and runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations against your actual numbers rather than a generic estimate. Because it’s pulling live data, the results update automatically as your balances change, and you can stress-test scenarios like retiring earlier, spending more in the early years, or a market downturn.
2. The Social Security Administration’s official estimator
Before running any broader retirement calculator, it’s worth getting your actual Social Security numbers from the source. The SSA’s online estimator, accessible through your free my Social Security account, shows your projected benefit at age 62, full retirement age, and 70 based on your real earnings history — the single most important input for most people’s retirement income plan, and one that generic calculators often only estimate.
3. Boldin (formerly NewRetirement)
Boldin’s free tier goes deeper than a basic calculator, letting you model Social Security claiming age, Roth conversions, healthcare costs, and part-time work in retirement all in one place. It’s a good fit if you want to compare several different retirement strategies side by side — for example, claiming Social Security at 65 versus 70, or retiring at 63 versus 67 — rather than just getting a single yes-or-no answer on whether your current plan works.
How to use these together: start with the SSA estimator to nail down your real benefit numbers, then run those figures through Empower or Boldin for a fuller picture that accounts for your savings, spending, and investment mix. None of these tools replace a conversation with a financial advisor for a complex situation, but they’re a genuinely useful first step — and unlike sitting down with an advisor, you can try different scenarios as many times as you like at no cost.
PMV Consulting, LLC 
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