Retirement calculator: Interactive visualization using Bokeh

September 09, 2017

Retirement calculator

[See source code] The goal of this figure is to illustrate how long a savings plan will take to yield an interest-based income that is sufficient for retirement. Move the sliders to define savings. Note that income is adjusted for inflation and income tax. It is useful to see how changing each of the parameters involved advances and delays the anticipated retirement date.

Black line - estimated annual income on interest

Red line - minimum annual income needed to retire (set by user)

Green line - year at which annual interest on savings covers the desired retirement income

Motivation

I was recently debating how much/little we need to save in order to retire comfortably. We were pretty surprised when we crunched the numbers and saw how early we may potentially retire. I thought it’d be fun to use Bokeh to make a plot illustrating the age at which we can expect to retire comfortable. It’s also interesting to see how much of a difference it can make by saving when you’re young: using the default parameters, a person who had $100,000 already would retire 7 years earlier than someone without any current savings (35 years vs. 42 years)!

Other retirement calculators found online don’t take into account income tax or even inflation, and just generally aren’t as appealing and informative as a Bokeh plot.