The Keep is the portfolio value you need today—before withdrawing this year's living expenses—to fund the years ahead and still reach your long-term goal.
The Keep Calculator™ is an on-line, non-downloadable software calculator for retirement planning — providing temporary use of on-line non-downloadable software for providing online retirement calculators for individual consumers.
Most retirement projections show you inflated future numbers that are hard to picture. The Keep works in today's purchasing power, so $54,000 means what $54,000 means to you right now.
Open most retirement planning tools and you'll find projections showing six- or seven-figure balances at age 85 or 90. The numbers look impressive until you remember that those dollars are future dollars — inflated versions of today's purchasing power that are genuinely hard to reason about.
Will $1.2 million in 2045 be a lot of money? It depends entirely on what prices look like in 2045. And the further out the projection goes, the harder it is to picture.
There's a cleaner approach: work in real terms throughout. Express everything in today's dollars and use a real return rate that has already accounted for inflation. That's what the Keep Method does, and it makes retirement planning meaningfully more readable.
Nominal dollars are the actual dollar amounts you'll spend or receive in any future year, after inflation has increased prices from where they are today. If you spend $54,000 per year today and inflation averages 3%, in 10 years you'll be spending roughly $72,600 to maintain the same lifestyle.
Real dollars are today's purchasing power. If your plan shows a net need of $27,000 in real terms, that means $27,000 worth of today's groceries, housing, healthcare, and everything else — regardless of what year it is. The nominal number in that year will be higher; the real purchasing power is the same.
Working in real terms doesn't pretend inflation doesn't exist. It handles inflation inside the return assumption. Instead of a nominal return of 7% and inflation of 3% separately, you use a real return of approximately 3.88% (the mathematical combination) and work entirely in today's dollars throughout.
The practical advantage of working in real terms is that the numbers stay interpretable throughout the plan. When the calculator tells you your net need after Social Security is $27,000 per year, that's $27,000 of today's purchasing power in every year of your plan. You don't have to mentally adjust for inflation to understand whether that number makes sense.
Nominal projections require constant adjustment. Is $75,000 of annual spending in 2040 a lot or a little? You have to convert it back to today's terms to know. With real projections, $54,000 is $54,000 from the first year of retirement to the last, and you can reason about it directly.
Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation through cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs). In real terms, this means your Social Security benefit stays roughly flat as purchasing power: the nominal amount goes up with inflation, but it buys approximately the same basket of goods each year.
That's why Social Security enters the Keep as a flat real amount. If your benefit is $27,000 in today's dollars, the calculator treats it as $27,000 of coverage in every year once it begins — not growing in real terms, not shrinking. Fixed pensions without COLAs are different: they stay fixed in nominal terms, which means they lose real purchasing power over time. The calculator handles both.
Once you're working in real terms, the full shape of a retirement plan becomes legible. You can see how much the portfolio covers in the bridge years before Social Security arrives, how much coverage is added when guaranteed income begins, and how the Keep falls as the number of remaining years shrinks.
The year-by-year walk in the calculator shows every year from now to your longevity age in today's dollars. The balances, the Keep, the living costs, the surplus or deficit — all in the same purchasing power. Reading a 30-year plan in today's dollars is much easier than reading it in a mix of nominal amounts that require mental adjustment at every row.
Run your retirement plan in today's dollars.
Open the Keep Calculator →This article is educational and is not individualized financial, tax, or investment advice. Inflation assumptions are uncertain, and actual future prices may differ significantly from projections.