Net Worth Milestone Calculator

Net worth is your total assets minus your total liabilities — everything you own (cash, investments, retirement accounts, home equity) minus everything you owe (mortgage, loans, credit card balances). Current Net Worth is the starting point for the projection, and the calculator assumes it grows only through your entered Monthly Savings and Expected Annual Return, not through any other changes to your assets or debts.

It runs a month-by-month simulation: each month it adds your Monthly Savings to your projected balance and applies one-twelfth of your Expected Annual Return as compounding growth, repeating until the balance reaches your Target Milestone. This step-by-step approach, rather than a single formula, is what lets the calculator also report Total Contributions and Total Growth from Returns as two separate pieces of the final number.

It helps, but the effect depends heavily on how close you already are to the milestone and how large your Monthly Savings are relative to your balance. When your monthly contributions are large relative to your current balance and the gap to your target is small, most of the progress comes from the savings themselves and a moderately higher return barely changes the month count — compounding only becomes the dominant factor over longer horizons or when the target is much larger relative to your monthly savings.

The month-by-month simulation stops after 100 years (1,200 months) even if the balance hasn't reached the target yet, so that a milestone that's mathematically out of reach at your current Monthly Savings and Expected Annual Return — for example, zero savings and zero assumed growth — still returns a finite, honest result instead of looping indefinitely. If your result shows 1,200 months, treat that as a signal your current savings rate won't realistically reach the target, not as a literal 100-year plan.