The paper ones were as about as accurate as the ones are on line thru the SS website. You have put put in your SS number so what you get is a complilation of your paychecks over the years (I called them and checked). There are a lot of sites out there, MSN money being one, where you can do calculations. The institution that handles my 401K has a few but I don't do them anymore - its too depressing. I will be 62 in October - I can claim mine then - a whopping 1,800 a month which won't even cover my mortgage,taxes and insurance let alone all of the other stuff, or I can wait till I am 70 and get like 3,400 a month (that is so not going to happen and I am so not going to work that long voluntarily). One of my major problems is I can't qualify for medi care till I am 66 which means out of pocket till then.
My 401 has done a yoyo the past couple of years. I have a ton of options for investments but have gone with consertative. My goal was to get enough in there to pay off my house so I wouldnt have to worry about THAT payment, and put the house in a trust for the boys that payoff goal I have met but now that I am inching closer rapidly, my options are constantly changing-do I now want to sell it eventually and move to a cheaper state..sigh... I put away 14% of my annual, plus what the boss kicks in and I thought a few years ago that would be enough-not with the way the stock markets going it isn't. If my job goes I will pull it all out and set up a Schwab account or similar. They will take 20% of it for taxes but I won't have another 10% penality due to my age.
The one thing in all of my planning I never took into account was if you go on medi care/medi cal here, they look for ways to pay themselves back. Shoot, you even have to turn over your life insurance -we just put SO's mom on medi cal, and had to give them bank statements and a copy of her funeral policy which will pay out 1,800 to have her creamated - Ca only allows you 1,500 to do that so they get the extra. They wanted to make sure they got their money and went over the contract with a fine tooth comb to make sure SO wasn't going to get any money, that it wasn't a true "life insurance" policy. And SO just went thru the same thing - they do an audit of your bank account and saw that he had an automatic payment for what they thought was life insurance-it was burial insurance but again they wanted the contract. I think they can research back 5 years to make sure no one in your family has gotten any money out of your estate as Medi Cal/Medi care -they are first in line.
It hovers to do all of this planning and thinking and then realize that you could lose everything based on one catastrophy LOL
Marcie