📈Net Worth Projector
Project how your net worth compounds over time based on your contributions and expected return.
Your Numbers
Your Results
What Is Net Worth Projector?
A net worth projection shows how your investable assets compound over time given a starting balance, ongoing contributions, and an expected rate of return. It's the visual version of "how does my money grow if I just keep doing what I'm doing," and it's one of the most useful tools for tracking progress toward financial independence over a multi-year horizon.
Net worth is a legitimate and valuable measure of financial progress. Watching it grow over months and years is motivating, and the trend line matters more than any single data point. But net worth is a progress metric, not a retirement readiness metric, and the distinction matters more than most financial tools make clear.
The reason is that retirement income comes from investable assets generating returns, not from net worth as a total figure. A person with $600,000 in a brokerage account and a home worth $600,000 has a net worth of $1.2 million. That sounds like more than enough to retire on. But if their home equity is not being converted to income, and their $600,000 in investments at a 4% withdrawal rate generates $24,000 per year, the actual retirement income from their portfolio is $24,000, regardless of what the house is worth. If their annual spending is $60,000, they are not financially independent, even with a seven-figure net worth.
This is one of the most common points of confusion in early retirement planning, and it creates real risk for people who check their net worth, feel like they've arrived, and stop scrutinizing whether their investable assets specifically can support their spending. A paid-off home is a financial asset, but it produces no income unless it's sold or rented. A business, a vehicle, personal property, a vacation home: all of these add to net worth and none of them generate the kind of liquid, market-based returns that a retirement withdrawal plan draws from.
The projector on this page focuses on investable assets for exactly this reason. Think of net worth as the scoreboard and investable assets as the actual resource your retirement depends on. Track both, but plan around the number that actually generates income.
How This Calculator Works
The projection compounds annually: each year's ending balance becomes next year's starting balance, growth is applied, then the year's contribution is added.
Personal Considerations
Compound growth curves look deceptively gentle in the early years and then bend sharply upward later, which means the early years, when the chart looks almost flat, are exactly when most people lose motivation and either stop contributing or chase a different strategy. Knowing the shape of the curve in advance is itself a tool for staying the course.
It's also worth noticing whether you find yourself adjusting the "expected return" input upward every time the projection disappoints you. That's a subtle form of motivated reasoning, using the calculator to confirm a timeline you've already decided on, rather than to test it honestly.
Mental accounting creates a specific distortion here: people who receive a bonus, a tax refund, or an inheritance often treat that money as a different category from regular income, spending it more freely rather than directing it to savings. Economically, every dollar has the same value and the same compounding potential regardless of its source. The net worth projector makes this concrete: a one-time $10,000 addition to your starting balance at 7% growth over 20 years becomes roughly $38,700, the same contribution sitting in a 'found money' mental account and spent on a vacation produces $0 of compounding. Routing windfalls directly to savings or investment, before they enter the spending account, is the most effective way to break the mental accounting pattern.
If what you're feeling goes beyond what a calculator can help with, licensed clinicians are available at SanaNetwork.com, a referral network founded by this site's founder, Dr. Yoendry Torres.
Frequently Asked Questions
A common starting point is 6-7% for a diversified stock-heavy portfolio after inflation, or 4-5% for a more conservative mix. Use a number you'd be comfortable being wrong about in either direction, and consider running the projection twice, once conservative, once optimistic.
No, it assumes a flat annual contribution for simplicity. If your contributions will grow, run the projection a few times with different contribution levels to bracket a range.
That's compounding: in early years, most of the balance is your own contributions; in later years, growth on growth starts contributing more than new money does. This is normal and is the entire point of investing early.