Need to find out where you stand?

So you are sitting in your office, your cubical or just chillin' in the back room or on the loading dock and thinking about your retirement. Do you have enough money? What about Social Security? You've go a lot of questions. Do you want to get an idea of where you stand in the race to retirement? A retirement planning calculator might help.

When it comes to retirement planning calculators available on the internet, there are a lot to choose from. There are simple calculators like the one available at CNN/Money.com, but sometimes simple is not necessarily better. One calculator I like is called ESPlannerBasic created by Professor Laurance Kotlikoff, Professor of Economics at Boston University. The great thing about ESPlannerBasic is that it's easy to use, free and it allows you to customize the calculations to fit your specific situation.

Too often retirement calculated make assumptions that do not fit your life situation. As a result, the conclusions that the retirement calculator reach will probably be inaccurate. Not so with ESPlannerBasic. Try it and see for youself.

Note that Professor Kotlikoff offers two even more detailed calculators called ESPlannerPlus and ESPlannerPro if you want to pay for them. I haven't tried these versions but I would expect them to be even more accurate than ESPlannerBasic, since they allow you to customize the results even further. Good luck with your planning.