Retirement Asset to Salary Ratio Calculator and More!


Today I received an e-mail message from my friends at TIAA-CREF who holds the bulk of my retirement assets. Included was an interesting webinar that talks about a retirement asset to salary ratio that can be used to see how well you are saving for retirement especially after stocks took the big hit in 2008/2009. When I saw that I knew it looked like an on-line calculator in the making to me, but TIAA-CREF did not have one on their site! So I knew I had to create one. First I interpolated their graph so you do not only have every 5 year increments on the retirement, but every year in between, and then I calculated the ratio for anyone who wants to enter their asset balance and salary (since dividing two numbers is so much work!) If you are going to make the 70% or 90% of salary goals I tell you, and if not I tell you now much more you need to get there. Hey, it sounded like a fun little calculator for me to write, so here it is.

I also saw that Firefox 8 was just released and when I was checking to see what new updates were added I found an article that mentioned that Firefox and Chrome are just about tied in usage and Chrome should pass up Firefox soon. I thought I would check out our log files on our rather popular website here at the university, meteorites.wustl.edu, where you can learn everything you want to know about meteorites! That site had over a million hits in October which should be a pretty good sampling of hits and more than twice as many as my own www.hughchou.org (about 400K hits in October). Checking the meteorites site, however, I realized that neither Chrome for Firefox was the #2 browser there, it was Safari:
1) Internet Explorer: 46.1%
2) Safari: 21.0 %
3) Firefox: 19.3%
4) Chrome: 10.7%
So I thought I would check hughchou.org's logs to see if the same profile existed since the audience there is a bit different, but the numbers were rather similar:
1) Internet Explorer: 44.1%
2) Safari: 22.3%
3) Firefox: 14.8%
4) Chrome: 9.7%
Perhaps both my sites are more popular among folks with Apple products than the typical sites, especially being more "academically" minded, but I found it interesting that Safari was so popular on both sites. I did break down the Safari usage to find out that 51% of those hits are from a Mac of some sort, 37% are from Safari on Windows machines, and about 12% are from iPhones and iPods. I never realized Safari was so popular!

Comments

Seth M. Davis said…
How about tweaking the calculator to allow inputs for the assumables: salary growth, investment return and annual contribution percentages? :)
11:32 AM
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