Retirement Cash Flow Calculator: Usage Guide
This tool brings a Chinese household's income, expenses and assets before and after retirement into one annual projection. It explores how cash flow changes under your assumptions. It does not determine when you should retire or which investments you should buy.
Prepare your household figures
- Enter the starting year, projection duration, each adult's starting age and retirement year, and the annuity starting year. For a single-person household, set the other adult's age to 0.
- Enter after-tax monthly salaries, monthly pensions after retirement, monthly insurance annuity payments and dividend-paying assets. Use estimates based on information you actually have; the example figures are not promises of future payments.
- Enter initial investable assets, separately held insurance assets, dividend yield and the annual asset return rate. Avoid counting the same return in both dividends and asset growth.
- Add each child with their birth year and independence age. Child expenses use age-based stage budgets; individual budgets can override the shared household template.
- Enter recurring expenses, then add home replacements, car replacements and other one-off major expenses separately by year and net out-of-pocket cost.
How the annual model works
Monthly household income is the sum of that year's salary or pension income, applicable annuity payments and monthly dividends. Monthly dividends equal dividend-paying principal multiplied by the annual dividend yield, divided by 12. Recurring monthly expenses include other household costs and each child's applicable stage budget.
Annual surplus = (monthly income − recurring monthly expenses) × 12 − that year's one-off major expenses. Year-end investable assets = opening investable assets × (1 + annual asset return rate) + annual surplus. Insurance assets are shown separately, do not participate in this roll-forward and are not automatically reduced by annuity payments.
Changes apply by calendar year. Pension income applies for the full retirement year, and annuity payments apply for the full starting year. The model does not calculate retirement by month, assess pension eligibility or estimate local pension policy.
Interpreting funding shortfalls
The first funding shortfall is the first year with negative year-end investable assets. The model continues to project negative balances. This does not mean a loan is automatically available or that the household can finance a deficit at the same return rate. A projection without a shortfall does not guarantee that real-world liquidity problems will never occur.
For expense ranges, the base scenario uses the year and amount midpoints. Two other scenarios combine the earliest year with the higher cost and the latest year with the lower cost. These are scenarios under different assumptions, not probability forecasts or guaranteed worst-case bounds. Try adjusting income, expenses, returns and retirement dates separately to see whether the result depends too heavily on a single assumption.
Inflation, returns and limitations
All amounts are nominal Chinese yuan (CNY). The model does not automatically adjust for inflation, salary growth, taxes, asset prices or market fluctuations. It does not include random simulations or sequence-of-returns risk. A long-term nominal balance cannot be interpreted directly as future purchasing power.
Results are for learning and discussing scenarios only. They are not investment, insurance, tax or retirement advice, and they do not guarantee principal or future returns. Real decisions require independent verification and, where appropriate, advice from qualified professionals.
Examples, saving and corrections
All built-in example figures are fictional. Inputs and your language preference are saved in the current browser. Clear inputs clears the current scenario; exported CSV files are downloaded locally. See the data and privacy notice for details.
The author is Simon Liu. If you find a calculation or interface issue, report it through the project repository using a reproducible example that contains no personal financial information. More author information and contact channels are available on the author's introduction page.