100 years of real market history

Will I reach a million?

Answer a few questions. We'll show how your savings could grow, using real stock market history from the S&P 500, the Dow and the Nasdaq.

100 years of data3 real marketsEvery start year since 1926

1Where will your money grow?

2How much can you save each day?
Show money in
Fund fee per year
Cheap index funds charge about 0.05%.
Your answer

$0$1 million

Watch it grow

Where the money comes from

Worst case, most likely, best case

What you'd have, by the year you started

Reached $1 millionFell short$1 million line

The same plan in every market

Most likely result for each choice

Three things that matter most

1

Start early.

2

Don't stop when the market drops.

Every saver in this history lived through crashes. Some lost a third of their savings in one year. The ones who kept saving still came out ahead.

3

Pick a low-fee fund.

See every start year in a table

Please keep in mind

  • This is for learning only. It is not financial, tax or investment advice. Talk to a licensed professional about your situation.
  • Past results don't promise future results. US stocks had an unusually strong century.
  • The Nasdaq only goes back to 1972, so it has fewer start years and can't test plans longer than 54 years. We don't estimate the missing years. Its strong record comes mostly from a few big tech booms, so use it as a rough guide for a tech-heavy fund.
  • You can't invest in an index directly. Real funds that track them get close to these returns but not exactly.
  • Taxes and employer 401(k) matches aren't included.
  • Stock balances go down sometimes, occasionally by a lot. Keep an emergency fund so you never have to sell during a crash.

How we worked this out

  1. Your daily amount × 365 is what you save each year.
  2. For a real market, your balance grows or shrinks each year by what that market actually returned that year, with dividends reinvested. Each year's savings are counted as arriving halfway through the year.
  3. The yearly fund fee you picked is taken out. "None" shows the full market return.
  4. The Watch it grow chart follows the person with the middle result. If you pick a specific start year, or tap a bar in the start-year chart, the answer, the $1 million meter and the chart switch to what really happened from that year.
  5. We repeat this for every possible start year, as if a different person started saving in each one. Most likely is the middle result. Worst case and best case are the lowest and highest results that actually happened. The future could fall outside that range.
  6. Today's dollars adjusts for rising prices using each year's actual inflation, so the numbers show what your money would buy now. Future dollars shows the actual amount you'd see on your statement, which looks bigger but buys less.
  7. For steady 7% or your own rate, there's one smooth path with no ups and downs. The rate counts as growth after inflation. In future dollars we add 3% a year of inflation, the long-run US average.

Sources