All of these retirement calculators are flawed in the same ways:

- None of them account for a self employed person like myself that has had some big years of income that not only can't be depended on as sustainable, they also allowed us to spend well beyond what we really needed.  What earning years should I use as the average?

- My home (and a heck of a lot of other people now in the GTA and other regions) is worth over a million bucks.  Who says I can't just downsize this if and when I need to?  

- There's no dependable way to estimate how much money I will leave my kid when me and my wife are gone.  Maybe he'll have more money than me one day and won't need a dime from me.   

My personal approach is to just assume the house is his one day and everything else gets spent.  Then I calculate what *I* think is a reasonable amount of income in retirement and I run some numbers based on inflation against costs and a super conservative return on investments and voila!