Why everything is in today's dollars

Every number MangoDime shows you — and every number you enter — is in today's dollars. The simulation removes inflation from each year's return before it compounds anything, so a result never means less than it looks like.

MangoDime's engine runs entirely in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, not nominal ones. Each simulated year draws a real historical stock and bond return, and that year's inflation is stripped out of the blended return before it's applied to your balances — a default assumption of 2.5% a year, which you can change on the Assumptions section.

That's why a $4,100 monthly paycheck means what $4,100 buys right now, not a bigger nominal number decades from now. It's also why Social Security doesn't need a separate cost-of-living adjustment in the model — a benefit that keeps pace with inflation already has a constant real value once everything is expressed in today's dollars. Pensions, by contrast, don't all keep pace automatically, so they have an optional cost-of-living field of their own.