If you are asking yourself questions such as: What will a market downturn at only the beginning or midpoint of your retirement do to my plan? How will an unexpected cost affect me at different points in my retirement? If I earned a little extra income in specific years of retirement how big of an impact would it make? **THEN THIS THE TOOL FOR YOU** This planner is set up to allow you to quickly input all the relevant information you have regarding your retirement investment portfolio and savings, as well as your current and future income and spending. Then the real fun begins, allowing you to speedily modify nearly any variable factor at any point in your retirement life cycle to understand how it would impact your plan. Oh, AND you can easily compare each scenario you create. For those working on the fly without a strong handle on their income, portfolio and future expenses, this tool would likely be better for you as a Round 2 scenario analysis rather than an all-in-one-planner. It lacks some of the bells and whistles a beginner might benefit from, such as itemized spending worksheets and dual income entry that help to ensure you have an accurate view of your starting point.

The Fidelity Retirement Income Planner is impressive in the comprehensiveness it can achieve while still guiding you the process rather painlessly, offering tips on how to properly input and estimate along the way. Great combination for the novice that wants it all. A small example of this is when you arrive at the expenses -- you can utilize Fidelity’s detailed spend worksheet if you are needing some help. Need help estimating future healthcare expenses? It will provide you with the averages and provide you with a detailed breakdown of what to expect in insurance costs.

TD Ameritrade Wealth Ruler is a nicely designed, well-documented calculator for a quick look at retirement planning based on the tool's set of assumptions. However, the tool does not offer as many options to configure variables, create alternative scenarios or download/save in a report and year by year format.

This calculator would probably function as a great guideline for those without much of a nest egg in the market and includes many easy to adjust factors, however it is not a comprehensive for those with an investing portfolio. The AARP Retirement Calculator is a quick estimate tool that is easy and even a little fun to use. In addition, it offers links to a set of helpful resources.

FireCalc is a retirement calculator focused on portfolio analysis that provides some great what-if scenarios that include supporting data and an insightful illustration of the results of your Monte Carlo analysis. It also manages to gather enough information about your specific situation (as long as you're paying attention) to put it into what I'd call the 'comprehensive planner' category. At first glance it may be a bit intimidating or off-putting due to the homegrown design - but for what it lacks in user interface, or ease of use, it easily makes up for in meat and potatoes analysis. And after scouting around the site a bit it starts to come together and feels almost intuitive, particularly once I started reading all the words on the page, a.k.a. very helpful information, that I was initially trying to navigate around in my quest to see 'figure out how this thing works.'

Voyant @Home is probably not efficient for the user who would like to run a few retirement calculator scenarios or dabble in a second opinion on how your nest egg is looking, but if you don't already have a plan detailed out somewhere and you are ready to hunker down for some serious and long-term DIY Personal Finance planning - Voyant @Home seems like perfection. Voyant @Home is a planner you can download to your PC to save, track and tweak as life moves along.