Why I built Retirement Forecast

I built this for myself first.

For most of my career I was a software engineer — a lot of it at a healthcare company. As I got closer to retirement, I kept circling the same quiet question everyone eventually asks: am I actually going to be okay?

I went looking for a straight answer and didn't really find one. The tools were either a spreadsheet I had to babysit and second-guess, or advisor software so full of jargon and dials that you needed a finance degree to trust the result. I just wanted to know one simple thing: if I keep living the way I live, will my money last — and if not, when does it run out?

So, on nights and weekends, I built the tool I wished existed. You enter your income, your expenses, and your savings, and it shows you month by month whether the money holds — and the exact month it might not. Later I added a way to bring in your real spending, because guessing what you spend is where most plans quietly go wrong.

I had one rule the whole way: keep it simple. No jargon you have to decode — powerful enough to trust, plain enough to actually use in an afternoon.

It worked. It gave me a clear picture of my own retirement, including a couple of things I needed to change. And I figured if it helped me, it could help other regular people asking the very same question. So I cleaned it up, and I'm sharing it.

It isn't financial advice, and it isn't magic. It's an honest, understandable look at your future — the tool I wanted, now yours too.

— Gene, founder