When it comes to figuring out if you will outlive your money in retirement, most people make only a best guess. But why guess? You can use good calculators to help figure out if your retirement income will support your expenses and if you need to dip into your investments. A good calculator will also include inflation for your expenses.

You may have read stories about people who have retired early. There really is no magic to it. Lots of articles, lots of books, entire careers devoted to helping other people end their careers early, but no magic.

You normally have a variety of levers you can pull when looking at retirement. If you target a certain age for retirement, you eliminate how far you can pull one of those levers, which is time--you are taking away the option of delaying retirement beyond a certain date. That's OK; it's just something to be aware of.

If you have the good fortune to have $2 million or more saved for retirement, perhaps you're asking the question: Is this enough money for me to retire with? Can one live a stress-free retirement with this much money?

Many people are surprised by how large their Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) are in retirement. You should prepare for the tax hit that comes with these withdrawals by using a good RMD calculator to project your RMDs.