Plan Your Retirement With Excel’s Goal Seek Function
Excel journeyman know you can plug in numbers and get formula results from a spreadsheet. Lesser known, however, is the ability to figure out what numbers are need to get a certain result, which works perfectly for retirement planning.
“Chief Excel Officer” Chandoo runs down how to use Excel’s Goal Seek feature to create a kind of retirement target advisor. You’ll fill out a spreadsheet with the financial status you seek to achieve by the time you’re ready to put your hammer down, and leave one cell as the variable that tells you how much you’ll have to set aside each week, month, or other time period to hit that big goal down the line. Goal Seek is useful in a number of other ways, of course, but the tutorial at Chadoo’s Pointy Haired Dilbert blog uses retirement savings as a relatable framework for understanding how Goal Seek should be used in your own quest to find the Xs in your future equations.
Excel Goal Seek Tutorial – Learn how to use goal seek feature by building a retirement calculator in Excel [Pointy Haired Dilbert: Charting & Excel Tips]
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@MasterChi!?!: I'm having formula troubles too.
The formula he provides is worthless. I keep getting results that are considerably off. Does anyone out there know what the correct formulas should be?
Can someone provide some help or post their excel spreadsheet. I tried following his instructions but they are horrible. The one part where he gives the formula.....yea nothing. And then for one digits he has 7,15,939.........what kind of number is that? shouldn't it be 715,939?I'll try it again but i'm a bit confused just trying to use his numbers.
**Edit = Formula in cell must results in a number. I assume i put the formula in the wrong place or didn't move the locations properly (Maybe my A5 is his A6 in description)?
In earlier versions it's still called Goal Seek but you do have to add the plug-in packages @virgilstar mentioned.
I'm pretty sure this used to be called the "solver" function in earlier versions of excel, and it was part of a plug-in package that has to be installed separately (i.e. not automatic with standard install).