[msmith]

I use New Retirement and one of my biggest complaints about that app is that it expects you to provide the optimistic/pessimistic rate of return for each of your investment accounts. I would love to have a tool that provides some guidance on setting those numbers, based on historical returns and the asset classes in the account.

I can see value in having similar guidance for things like mortgage interest rates. Maintaining all of this educational content and keeping it up to date may be a challenge, though.

[NoLinkToMe]

Yeah quite a few FIRE tools which allow you to model retirement scenarios will let you pre-fill return rates based on historic returns.

This one is pretty nice to mimic. You have to Ctrl+F for 'projection method' and then switch it to Historic Cycles, or Monte Carlo Simulation:

https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/

Then you'll see basically a distribution appear on the graph with the median (50%), but also the 25% & 75%, and the 10% & 90% likely return scenarios.

Quite useful to see what a bottom 10% ('worst-case') scenario would look like, and how it would affect your finances and your timelines.

[scubakid]

Showing or linking to the relevant historical data/rates next to each of those inputs sounds like a good feature idea to me.