Actually, don't even need to know how to calculate this ( but you can still find out easily). There are so many calculators out there that can help you with it.
Sometimes it is not whether the calculators out there.
It is whether you know that you need to find a calculator at all.
For example, there are a lot of loan amortization calculators out there. But what I realize is that.. many friends still are bewildered about how to determine and get a profile of their principal and interest paydown.
In a way, some of us may not see things from a certain angle until someone else frames things for us in a certain way.
Perhaps I can share an example.
The traditional way of financial planning is to ask someone how much you need to spend in retirement. When do you need to retire. How long you will be retiring for.
With these parameters, they work out how much you need.
Usually, it is likely to be a very big sum of money that you have to come to terms with to get to where you are.
There are different ways to help the situation.
An easy way is to explain to people: A lot depends on the nature of your expenses. Your expenses during retirement will look very different from your expenses today.
What you can do is go through how you will live your life in retirement and then we assign a cost to it.
The amount you need in retirement is better optimized and therefore the sum you need to build up to is reduced.
Now if you ask me, this should be rather intuitive (looking at your retirement spending as a line item and cost it accordingly)
But many do not realize that is the way to optimize retirement expenses.
The value of forums like HWZ money mind and others like Seedly is to raise awareness that this is a way to frame things.
But even after this, some people will think: "Is it really that way? Do professionals such as a certified advisers optimize my retirement differently? Do they have more sophistication?"
And this is a reason why despite them hearing this is the way to plan, they still go and find a financial planner.
It is to validate whether what they know is the real truth or is there something better.
We see a variation of this example played out sometimes in legal, medical advice.