Who does not want to retire in style? You might have dreamt of retiring as a millionaire in a grand house and with health and other securities in place so that at the old age you do not have to depend on any body else or the meager means of social security. Thinking that it is not possible with your present income? Everything is possible if you take up a proper retirement planning at the proper time. An effective retirement planning starts with the annuity calculation. Annuity refers to a particular type of retirement plan, where you require to invest a particular amount every year with the interest rate remaining fixed throughout. An annuity calculator is a tool to help you calculate how much income you might obtain out of the amounts saved, after retirement.

You reach a particular age when the responsibilities increase and you start to think about what schemes you should subscribe to that provides you with an adequate income after retirement. In many organizations, the employer provides for a pension scheme, where some portion of your salary is taken out and added with company's contribution to be saved in a pension fund and you get a monthly income from that fund after your retirement. But if your employer does not have such a scheme, or you are self employed, then you have to consider investing in a personal pension scheme. But before making any investment in any such scheme, you have to consider many points.

The first thing to consider is how much money you should invest in a pension scheme? Then you have to check carefully the estimated pension. Remember, you always get to see only the estimated figures in any Pension Calculator; they are not any guaranteed sum. The actual annuity income that you start to derive many years later is affected by such economic factors as interest rates, inflation and investment growth. For this annuity calculation is based on certain assumptions about the future on the basis of current economic scenario.

The common assumptions used in most of the annuity calculators are:

Investment growth, inflation rate, pension fund charges by the Provider Company, income tax rebates, Annuity rates and life expectancy.

The annuity calculator is also based on certain assumptions about you. It assumes you will be able to make a regular payment on a particular interval from the time of joining the scheme till the time of retirement. Another assumption is your payment increases each year to keep with the increased rate of interest.

Then you have to know whether your pension income will be worth to meet with the expenditure of tomorrow as with the increase in inflation rate, the buying power of money diminishes. Thus what you actually need to know is the actual value of your pension income at the time of retirement. Different annuity calculator takes different rates of inflation to work out the actual buying power of your estimated pension income at the time of your retirement.

In most of the annuity calculator four variables are used and values of the three variables are to be filled up by you and the calculator works out the value of the unknown variable. As a whole, annuity calculator is an extremely useful tool to let you know how accurately your present investments can be fitted into tomorrow's world.