Investment Calculator: See How Your Money Can Grow - NerdWallet
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Investment Calculator: See How Your Money Can Grow
Investing for the future? Use this calculator to estimate how your investment contributions and returns will grow over time. By Chris Davis Chris DavisAssistant Assigning Editor | Cryptocurrency, brokerage accounts, stock market Chris Davis is an assistant assigning editor on the investing team. As a writer, he covered the stock market, investing strategies and investment accounts, and as a spokesperson, he appeared on NBC Bay Area and was quoted in Forbes, Apartment Therapy, Martha Stewart and Lifewire, among others. His work has appeared in The Associated Press, The Washington Post, MSN, Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, Newsday and TheStreet. Previously, he was the content manager for the luxury property management service InvitedHome and the section editor for the legal and finance desk of international marketing agency Brafton. He spent nearly three years living abroad, first as a senior writer for the marketing agency Castleford in Auckland, NZ, and then as an English teacher in Spain. He is based in Longmont, Colorado. Learn More and Kevin Voigt Kevin Voigt
Writer | CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal Kevin Voigt is a former staff writer for NerdWallet covering investing. He previously was a reporter with The Wall Street Journal and business producer for CNN.com in Hong Kong, where he was based for nearly two decades. Learn More Updated Mar 28, 2023 Edited by Arielle O'Shea Arielle O'Shea
Lead Assigning Editor | Retirement planning, investment management, investment accounts Arielle O’Shea leads the investing and taxes team at NerdWallet. She has covered personal finance and investing for over 15 years, and was a senior writer and spokesperson at NerdWallet before becoming an assigning editor. Previously, she was a researcher and reporter for leading personal finance journalist and author Jean Chatzky, a role that included developing financial education programs, interviewing subject matter experts and helping to produce television and radio segments. Arielle has appeared on the Today show, NBC News and ABC's World News Tonight, and has been quoted in national publications including The New York Times, MarketWatch and Bloomberg News. She is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Learn More
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MORE LIKE THIS Personal Finance Investing Investing Planning & StrategyThe goal of any investment is to get more cash out than you put in. The profit (or loss) you incur is your return on investment. And thanks to compounding returns, the longer you leave your money invested, the higher your potential returns could be. Use our investment calculator to estimate how much your investment could grow over time.
Investment calculator
Enter your initial investment, any planned additional contribution, your overall time horizon and your expected return to estimate how much your investment might grow over time. For most investments, you'll want to opt for daily compounding.
How to use NerdWallet’s investment return calculator:
Enter an initial investment. If you have, say, $1,000 to invest right now, include that amount here. If you don’t have an initial amount to invest now, you can enter $0.
Enter your regular contributions. If you plan to invest a certain amount every month into your investment account (a strategy known as dollar-cost averaging ), include this amount after selecting the “monthly” option. Or, if you’d rather invest one lump sum once per year, choose “annually” and include your planned annual contribution. If you do not plan to make regular contributions, select either option and enter $0.
Choose how long your investment will grow. How long do you plan to keep your money invested? If you’re investing in stocks, it’s generally a good idea to stay invested for at least five years to weather any volatility post-purchase.
Enter your expected rate of return. For a point of reference, the S&P 500 has a historical average annual total return of about 10%, not accounting for inflation . This doesn’t mean you can expect 10% growth every year; you could experience a gain one year and a loss the next. But if you keep your money invested for the long term, the goal is for these gains and losses to average out over time, ideally ending significantly in the black by the end of the investment period. We've added a default return of 6%, which is fairly conservative — feel free to adjust it to match your expectations for your own investment portfolio.
Enter how frequently you want your investment returns to compound. You can opt to match the compounding frequency to your contribution frequency — meaning, if you plan to make additional contributions on a monthly basis, you'd choose monthly compounding. If you plan to make annual contributions, you might opt for annual compounding. But daily compounding is likely to get you closest to estimating typical investment performance. Compounding at more frequent intervals leads to higher growth over time.
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Learn More Learn More Learn MoreA note on calculating total investment returns vs. price returns
Something to consider when calculating investment return: Is it the price return or the total return?
Price return is the annualized change in the price of the stock or mutual fund. If you buy it for $50 and the price rises to $75 in one year, that stock price is up 50%. If the following year the price closes at $60, the stock price fell 20% that year. If it closes at $65 the third year, it increased by 8.3%.
Total return factors in regular cash payments from the investment, such as dividends. Over the past 30 years, the difference between the total return and price return of the S&P 500 has been about two percentage points annually, on average.
More calculators to help you with investment goals:
Retirement calculator .
401(k) calculator .
Roth IRA calculator .
Mutual fund calculator .
About the authors: Chris Davis is a NerdWallet investing writer. He has more than 10 years of agency, freelance, and in-house experience writing for financial institutions and coaching financial writers. Read more
Kevin Voigt is a former investing writer for NerdWallet. He has covered financial issues for more than 20 years, including for The Wall Street Journal and CNN.com. Read more
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