Calculate Your Financial Comeback

that's fantastic, thanks.

ali r.
{downtown broker}

Ugh.

Wow! Only 3 years. :)

steve, gets some perspective. if you want to be depressed why don't you dig a bit deeper and think about terminal illness, poverty in developing nations, and so on. my guess is that most of us left on here could take our loss and still live very comfortably for the rest of our lives. pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

"Only 3 years."

At what rate of appreciation? Personally I picked the rate of appreciation of Manhattan real estate over each of the past 5 years: 20% per year.

Amazing how rich I got.

I don't own any Manhattan real estate.

I picked 6% appreciation rate for my portfolio.

Calculators like this are quite useful.

One of the overlooked factors that influence the outcome tremendously is the degree to which you are early on in your life cycle or more established with a significant nest egg.

For people early on, annual savings as a percent of their existing portfolio can be quite large. For more established people further through their life cycle with a significant nest egg their annual savings as a percent of their portfolio tend to be relatively small. So the young can recover much more quickly - albeit to a still relatively low nest egg total. It's generally much tougher for people approaching retirement to recover quickly, by contrast.

Just as an fyi: J. P. Morgan recently increased its "long term" expected return from stocks from 8% to 9% reflecting how low stocks are now. Related to this, the yield alone on the S&P is now 3.18% so you only need an extra 5.82% price appreciation in the S&P to get you to that 9% figure.

(From 1926 to 2008 the average annualized return on the S&P was 9.61%)

Topper, the Times used to have a calculator where you input your age, income and maybe a couple of other variables and it spit out what your net worth should be. Or, basically how much you should have 'saved'(retirement, savings/investments, home equity, etc.) at a given point in your life. I can't seem to find it anymore. While perhaps it is a bit arbitrary, since everyone's situation and financial goals are unique, I did find it interesting...and perhaps a bit scary since I fell quite a bit short of the number it produced for me.

Anyway, I am curious if you know of a similar resource, or guidelines for the ideal savings rate and investment allocations based on one's particular circumstances. My wife and I seem to have different ideas about this...

Even your(or anyone's) thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Maybe your looking for something like this, Abe?
http://www.choosetosave.org/ballpark/index.cfm?fa=interactive

Let's try that again (with proofreading this time):

Maybe you're looking for something like this, Abe?
http://www.choosetosave.org/ballpark/index.cfm?fa=interactive

Wow, that's great...Thanks talljaystreet.