The pension calculator, “Crunch The Numbers” on our main homepage at www.PensionsForNomands.com shows you three different possible future values for your pension plan, based on the amount you choose to save each month and the pension plan duration – in addition to showing you how much you will have added to your pension plan in total.
The first is the guaranteed minimum future value – this is the absolute minimum reasonable expectation, in a worst-case scenario, but is much lower than you can reasonably expect. The next two values are based on what the future value of your pension plan would be assuming annual growth rates of 7% and 10% respectively.
In reality, because the value of your pension plan – both throughout and at the end of your chosen duration – is linked to the value of the S&P500 Index, the growth rates and therefore the value will vary, both on a day-to-day basis and a year-to-year basis, based on the performance of the S&P500 Index.
As you’ve probably been informed by financial institutions many times, past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. That said, unless you somehow have a way to accurately know what the future performance of the stock markets will be at any point in time, the only things you have which you can base any assessment on are firstly knowledge of how it works, and secondly the data of past performance.
There are many articles here on www.PensionsForNomads.com which will help you level-up your financial knowledgebase on how finance in general, and specifically the S&P500 Index works, and also detail the past performance – the long-term average return of the S&P500 Index is just under 10% per year, just remember that this is an average – it will not be precisely +10% every year, and in some years it could be as much as +30%, or as low as -30%, or even more. There is also a lot of information available from various credible sources online, so as ever, do some research!
In summary, whilst neither we nor anyone else can give you a 100% accurate prediction for the future value of your pension plan, we are very comfortable giving you three numbers on our pension calculator – a worst-case scenario, a conservative estimate, and a historical-return-based estimate which optimistically assumes that the long-term average performance in the past will continue in the future.
So go and crunch your numbers!