Those planning for retirement, or inching ever-closer to that day where retirement will become a reality, certainly have a ...

The article How Gen Z is Preparing (or Not) For Retirement originally appeared on NerdWallet.

The beauty of a retirement calculator is that you can play around with different scenarios. If you think $315,000 won't be enough for you, see what socking away $7,000 annually will do.

Most online retirement calculators have you enter some basic information to see how you're doing savings-wise. You'll commonly be asked to plug in: Your age. Your current retirement plan balance.

Some retirement calculators use sophisticated techniques called "Monte Carlo" forecasts, also known as "stochastic" projections. Other calculators use much more simple projections, such as ...

Our retirement calculator estimates your retirement savings based on your current contributions, and then calculates how your savings will stretch in today’s dollars, taking inflation into account.

Some calculators ask for your input about the rate of return you expect to get on your retirement savings and the future rate of inflation, while others make these assumptions for you.

Retirement calculators can vary widely in the number of questions they'll ask you. In theory, the more questions a calculator asks, the more accurate the results will be.

Retirement calculators also tend to default to an investment return. This is how they project how much money you’ll have, based on your current retirement account balance and ongoing contributions.

Yes, some online calculators are better than we are in projecting future retirement income streams. But they still simplify the world dramatically, and in doing so, they can give you biased advice.