Free Singapore Retirement Planning Simulation Spreadsheet

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Can I retire today? That’s the million dollar question that I ask myself from time to time.

While I have a spreadsheet that tracks my expenses and provides me statistics about my lifestyle on both monthly and annual basis, I didn’t have a forward-looking tool that provides insights into how changes to my lifestyle today can make an impact to my life in 10-20 years time later.

I know that I am changed from an extravagant lifestyle to one that is a lot more frugal with low monthly expenses and high savings rate. But will this new lifestyle allow me to retire by the age of 50 (as the title of this blog says) and most importantly, retire with a retirement portfolio that outlasts my lifespan?

With that in mind, I created the Singapore Retirement Planning Simulation Spreadsheet to provide insights into retirement planning for Singaporeans.

What is this free Singapore Retirement Planning Simulation Spreadsheet?

As its title suggests, the spreadsheet provides a simulation of how my life would be if I maintain my current lifestyle for the next few decades. To make it more realistic, I’ve added elements such as life expectancy, inflation estimates and investment portfolio growth forecasts.

What’s a Singapore Retirement Planning Simulation Spreadsheet without factoring Singapore’s retirement policies such as CPF retirement age, CPF Life payouts, Supplement Retirement Scheme (SRS) withdrawal age and 10-year SRS withdrawals.

How does this spreadsheet benefit me?

It doesn’t matter if you are an avid reader of my blog or perhaps you chanced upon this article through search results from search engines. Chances are, you are reading this article because you care about your retirement and want to build a plan for it.

By inputting information about your current lifestyle and your ideal retirement age, you will be able to see if you are able to achieve your retirement goals. If the answer is no, you can also make adjustments to the spreadsheet to find out what you need to change or improve in order to meet your retirement goals.

How to get started to use this spreadsheet?

Click here to view The Singapore Retirement Planning Simulation Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is in read-only mode and you will need to save a copy of the spreadsheet in your own Google account to use it.

To save a copy of the spreadsheet, you will need a Google account. Once you are signed in, make a copy of this document by clicking on File and Make a copy.

Input your information

In the My Information worksheet, update the cells that are highlighted in yellow with information about your current lifestyle.

Input your life expectancy age

In the Results worksheet, enter your estimated life expectancy age in the cell that is highlighted in yellow to indicate how long you expect yourself to live. The cells that are highlighted in light orange indicate your lifespan based on your life expectancy age. Your goal is to ensure that your Retirement Portfolio outlasts your lifespan.

Include additional retirement income (if any)

If you expect to receive additional income apart from your retirement portfolio, enter the amount you expect to receive on a monthly average for the year in the cells highlighted in yellow. An example would be rental income from your real estate investments.

Reviewing your retirement simulation results

Here’s where it gets interesting. Will you be able to retire based on your existing lifestyle?

In my simulation, I used an example of John Smith, a 30 year old Singaporean who earns $5,000 and spends $3,000 each month. Saving the remaining $1,000 means he is saving 25% of his net income each month. That’s not too bad right?

John is a hardworking employee in Megacorp (fictitious company name, duh!) and receives an average of increment of 3% each year. At the age of 30, John already has $20,000 in his investment portfolio and expects a growth of 5% on his investments each year. That’s above the inflation rate that he predicts to hover around 3%. John thinks that he will be able to meet the Full Retirement Sum needed in his CPF by the age of 55 so he sets the CPF Life Payout Forecast to $1,220. He intends to retire at the age of 65 once he starts receiving payouts from CPF Life and expects to live till 82.

How do you think John fared in this simulation?

Well it looks like John can retire at the age of 65 and have enough money in his retirement portfolio to last him till the age of 88 if he does not change his current lifestyle. That’s 6 years more than his estimated life expectancy age. The bad news is that if he lives beyond 89, he may have to either change his lifestyle, rely on his family for financial support, or go back into the workforce (which will be really difficult).

Making the little changes in your life to ensure you are on track for your retirement

I had a lot of fun creating this spreadsheet and learning along the way how the different variables in life can impact my retirement strategy. I’m certainly going to make more changes to my life to improve my retirement strategy so that I can retire by the age of 50 or earlier.

I hope you can make use of this Singapore Retirement Planning Simulation Spreadsheet to help you fulfil your financial dreams. It’s free and I’d love to hear your feedbacks on how I can improve on this spreadsheet.

12 Comments

  1. Hi Mickey J,

    I just spent the best part of the last hour fiddling with your spreadsheet and to be honest, I think the spreadsheet is pretty well done, especially in the local context.

    I don’t have any SRS investments for now but I was puzzled as to why SRS investments was not given a growth rate? That’s probably one tweak which you can make?

    But that’s probably a small variable in the context of things. If I am not wrong, I think if one can squeeze in an additional 0.5% (in terms of investment growth rate minus inflation rate), it will make alot of difference to the outcome.

    And of course, the amount of retirement income (for a semi-retiree wannabe like me) would influence greatly the year when I can leave full-time employment.

    I personally think this spreadsheet would be very useful as a gauge to what one would need to tweak during retirement to ensure a successful retirement.

    For eg, if I am drawing down the principal much earlier due to a market crash, perhaps it’s time to work a little harder on my part-time job or to reduce the amount of vacation I take?

    Hope you find my comments useful!

    1. Thanks for your comments, My 15HWW.

      The reason why I did not include that in is because there were too many variables to calculate for SRS investments. I’ll have a think about it and see if there’s a way to calculate SRS growth. I wouldn’t want to merely squeeze a 0.5% growth because some investors, like myself would invest the money in stocks and the returns would be a lot more.

      Hope to get that done in version 1.5 perhaps. πŸ™‚

    1. Hi Eddy,

      Sorry for the late response. It looks like there was something wrong with my Google account but it should be working find now. Please double check.

  2. Hi all, the link to the spreadsheet works perfectly. However, it will be in view only mode that does not allow editing (I mean, you wouldn’t want others to see your finance numbers right?). You will need to click on “File” and make a copy of the spreadsheet in your Google Drive before you can start using it.

  3. Hi! I’m interested to get the spreadsheet but I can’t find it on this page… where can I download it? Thanks!

    1. Hi, the Google Sheet is not meant to be downloaded and opened by Microsoft Excel. You should save as a copy in your Google Drive. Since it’s built using Google Sheets, it’s best used with Google Sheets. πŸ™‚

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