Merriman Financial Education Foundation Lifetime Investment Calculator

Imagine entering your personal numbers into a calculator that can show you the scenarios of your investment decisions? Now you can! We are excited to introduce The Merriman Educational Foundation Lifetime Investment Calculator. It was created by Craig Appl who, you will learn from this recording, is a newcomer to investing. He found our work and wanted a way to understand his own investment strategy by interactively applying his own numbers to our more than 150 tables and charts, created by Daryl Bahls. We are grateful that, like Daryl and Chris Pedersen, Craig volunteered to donate this work to our foundation so that all investors might benefit from it.

The calculator aims to bring the annual Merriman Best Advice to life so that community members can enter their own analysis, dive deeper into the recommended Merriman strategies, and draw conclusions from the foundation’s work.

As Craig explains, “This unique Lifetime Investment Calculator is built from the 2021 Fine Tuning Your Asset Allocation tables and includes enhancements like showing nominal vs. real returns, growth with contributions, fixed and flexible distributions. We don’t know the future, but the past contains many events that could happen again. The last 51 years include numerous wars, booms, busts, and periods of high and low inflation. We consider these last 51 years a sequence of returns and have chosen to loop through this 51 year sequence to support calculating up to 200 years of returns.”