Retirement Needs Assessment Workbook: Projecting Your Number with Your Own Data

Generic retirement planning advice tends to use placeholder numbers that bear no relationship to your actual life. This course replaces those placeholders with your real income, expenses, timeline, and goals, working through a series of structured worksheets that produce a personalized retirement needs assessment grounded in evidence. By the end of this course you will be able to complete a detailed annual retirement spending estimate, calculate an inflation-adjusted future spending target, determine a portfolio size goal using your preferred withdrawal rate assumption, and assess the gap between your current trajectory and your target. What you will learn: - How to build a retirement spending estimate from your current budget: which expenses will decrease, which will increase, and which will disappear in retirement - Adding healthcare: a worksheet for estimating Medicare premiums, supplemental coverage costs, and out-of-pocket expenses based on your health history - The inflation adjustment calculation: a step-by-step template for converting today's spending estimate into a year-one-of-retirement equivalent - Withdrawal rate selection: how to choose between 3%, 3.5%, 4%, and 4.5% based on your retirement duration and risk tolerance, with a table showing how the choice affects your target number - Gap analysis: calculating the difference between your current projected savings balance at retirement and your target portfolio size - Sensitivity analysis worksheet: how your required savings rate changes when you adjust expected returns, retirement age, or spending by modest amounts - A retirement income sources inventory: listing Social Security estimates, pension benefits, and other income to determine how much your portfolio actually needs to generate The course uses eight worksheets introduced sequentially, each with worked examples and blank versions. A final synthesis document consolidates your spending estimate, inflation-adjusted target, income sources, portfolio goal, and required monthly savings into a one-page retirement needs summary. This course is designed for workers who are ready to move from general retirement anxiety to a specific, evidence-based savings target. Suitable for those with no prior financial planning experience. This course is educational and does not substitute for advice from a licensed financial advisor.