About Retirement Odds Lab
Retirement Odds Lab is a free site built around one tool: a Monte Carlo retirement calculator that runs in your browser. The rest of the pages exist to help you read what that tool prints. This page says who stands behind the site, where its numbers come from, how it earns money, and what it is not.
Who runs the site
The site is written and maintained by an editorial team. No individual is named on these pages, and no page claims a personal credential for its authors. We would rather you judge the work by whether the sources are shown, the assumptions are visible and the limits are stated, since those are the things you can check for yourself.
The word "Lab" in the name means a calculator you can experiment with. It is not a credential, a license, a research institution or a claim of professional standing. Nobody here is a financial adviser, and nothing on the site is offered in that role.
What the site is, and what it is not
The site is education. The calculator takes the numbers you type, runs thousands of simulated retirements using stated assumptions, and reports how many of those simulated paths ended with money left. That count is what the model produced. It is not a prediction about your retirement and not a probability that yours will work out. The guides explain how to read the count, what moves it, and what a model of this kind leaves out.
It is not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. We do not tell you what to buy, sell, hold, spend or withdraw, and we do not describe any plan or any score as good or bad. For a decision about your own money, a qualified professional who can see your whole situation is the right person to ask.
Where the data and methods come from
The return assumptions come from a single public workbook of annual historical returns for US stocks, ten-year Treasury bonds and gold. It was compiled by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern and carries annual data from 1928 through 2025. Inflation in that workbook is the FRED consumer price series, which we use to turn each nominal return into a real return, one measured after inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the consumer price index as a measure of the average change over time in prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of goods and services.
The calculator offers two sets of assumptions. The default uses 1971 through 2025, which is 55 years. The alternative uses 1928 through 2025, which is 98 years. The choice of 1971 as the default is ours, and the methodology page explains it. Both samples are small, annual and real, and the pages say so wherever a result is quoted.
The statistics are computed from the workbook by the site's own code and are not typed in by hand. The mean and spread of each asset and the relationships among them are all derived, and the methodology page lists them, together with the checks we run on the engine. You can read all of it on the page that explains how this simulation works.
Our withdrawal and strategy pages describe published work, such as the best-known withdrawal-rate studies, only as far as we could read the original texts, and they say which statements are primary and which are secondary. Where we could not read a source, the page leaves the fact out and says so.
How the calculator treats your information
Nothing you type into the calculator is sent anywhere. The simulation runs in your browser, the page makes no request to send your inputs, and the site does not ask you to create an account or fill in a form. The home page has the Monte Carlo simulation retirement calculator itself, and the guides can be read without using it.
If you leave the site through the Augusta button, you go to a different company's page, and its own terms and privacy notice apply there. Our pages cannot see what you do after you leave.
How the site is paid: the affiliate disclosure
This site has one commercial partner, Augusta Precious Metals. When you request Augusta's free information kit through a link on this site, If that reader later becomes a customer of Augusta, Augusta pays this site. That is the whole arrangement, and it is the only way the site earns money.
We tell you this on every page and again here because it creates a reason for us to want you to click. We have set rules to keep that from shaping the guides. The explanations of the model, the withdrawal pages and the other guides carry no partner link inside their text; where a partner block appears, it is labeled and sits apart from the explanation. Where Augusta appears, we say plainly that the button requests a free kit, that the kit page's consent text mentions phone, text and autodialed contact, and that the minimum is $50,000 as stated by Augusta. We report what Augusta's own pages say with the date we read them, we say what we could not check, and we do not rank companies or give a verdict on this one.
The calculator shows what the model produced, including cases where adding gold lowers a score. It prints the difference whichever way it falls. The page on gold in the model shows both a case where gold raised a score and a case where it lowered one.
Corrections
The guides carry the date they were last updated. Data and sources carry the date we read them. If something on a page no longer matches its source, the source is the authority and the page should be corrected to match it.