12. Are you ready for Retirement?

Do you know anyone eligible for retirement? Well, one day it will be you who is eligible. Here's how to prepare! Put together a Retirement Savings Planning Calculator. The basic elements of the Calculator are your Annual Salary, the Percentage of your salary to be set aside in a 401k plan, your Employer's Matching funds, the Annual Return on your Investment, and the Number of Years you Expect to be Employed. This holds true whether you are an employee in someone else's company, or you are a business owner. You are permitted to put money into a 401k account tax-free!

With that basic information, you are able to set up formulas to calculate your Monthly Contribution to your Retirement Fund, your Employer's Contribution, and the Sum of both Contributions. Using the FUTURE VALUE Function, you can calculate the amount of money that you will have available at the time of your Retirement.

The calculation is based on a fixed Income, at a fixed rate of return, for a fixed number of years. Naturally that rarely will be the case in a person's lifetime, so this calculation is simply meant more as a guideline than as a real situation. It gives you a point of reference for thinking about Retirement Investments and Income.

Once you understand the process, you can begin to prepare for the day you can stop working and start enjoying yourself!!!

A Data Table
Adding a Data Table to complement our Retirement Calculator gives us the ability to look at a broader view of the calculations based around the number of years you expect to be employed.

In examining the comparisons, you can see that at around 10 years of employment, there is a break even point - that is, the Return on the Investment is about the same as the Actual Investment. After that the return on an investment grows unimaginably!

You can do this type of analysis quickly and simply only through the use of a spreadsheet. These techniques give you the tools to answer financial questions easily!

Materials Covered: Project 7 - Using Macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) with Excel, pp. EX 530-548