1. Retirement Income Calculator This T. Rowe Price tool allows you to provide detailed information about your finances—how your savings are invested, pension and Social Security payments, income from part-time work, if any, etc.—so you can come away with a nuanced sense of your retirement readiness. Once you know where you stand, you can then run alternative scenarios to see how you might improve your prospects. If you’ve already retired, this tool will help you determine whether your current level of spending is sustainable throughout retirement or whether you need to tighten your belt.

Rather than estimating the size nest egg you’ll need in retirement as many calculators do, this tool focuses on sustainable income. Specifically, you enter the amount of income you expect you’ll need in retirement (say, 80% of pre-retirement salary) and the tool uses Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the likelihood that the resources you’re projected to accumulate (or have already accumulated if you’re retired) will generate sufficient income throughout retirement. Generally, you want to see a success rate of at least 80%. If you fall short of that level, you can see how changing different aspects of your finances—saving more, spending less, cutting investment fees, etc.—might improve your chances of success. Revving up this calculator every year or so and making small tweaks as needed can prevent you from falling behind in your planning and help you avoid having to make dramatic and painful adjustments to your lifestyle later in life.

2. Risk Questionnaire—Allocation Tool One of the most important aspects of setting an investing strategy is choosing a stocks-bonds mix that jibes with your appetite for risk. Invest too aggressively, and you may end up selling stocks in a panic when the market dives. Invest too conservatively, and you may not earn the returns you need to achieve your goals. This questionnaire from Vanguard can guide you to an appropriate stocks-bonds allocation. Just answer 11 questions designed to probe, among other things, your investing habits and how you might react to major market setbacks, and you’ll receive a suggested mix of stocks and bonds (and, in some cases, cash). Click on the “other allocations link,” and you’ll get stats showing how your recommended portfolio as well as ones more aggressive and conservative have performed on average and in good and bad markets since 1926.

3. Retirement Income Planner (and Retirement Budget Worksheet) Estimating that you’ll need 80% or so your pre-retirement income after you retire may be okay for establishing a savings target during your career. But once you’re within 10 or so years of retiring, you want to get a better handle on what your actual retirement expenses might be. This interactive retirement budget sheet, which you’ll find within Fidelity’s Retirement Income Planner tool, will help you do just that. It not only has slots for 49 different expense items, ranging from cable and internet fees to health care and travel; it also allows you to check a box next to each expense designating whether it’s essential. The tool then provides a tally of all your expenses, plus a breakdown of essential vs discretionary ones. This can give you a sense of how much wiggle room you have to pare expenses if necessary, plus show you which areas are prime candidates for cuts. Of course, no level of detail will be able to sure 100% accuracy. But that’s not the goal. The point is to make the best estimate you can and then refine your budget (and your actual spending) as needed as you go along.

4. Financial Engines’ Social Security Calculator One of the single most important decisions retirees face is when to claim Social Security. Unfortunately, many retirees don’t give this issue the serious thought it deserves, and just take benefits as soon as they can (age 62) or soon thereafter. That can be a costly mistake. Each year you postpone benefits between age 62 and 70, your payment increases about 7% to 8%, dramatically boosting the amount you may collect during your lifetime. By taking advantage of a number of different claiming strategies, married couples may be able to boost their potential lifetime benefit several hundred thousand dollars.

Which is why in the years leading up to retirement, it’s a good idea to check out Financial Engines’ Social Security calculator. You just enter such information as your age, current income, the age at which you expect to begin collecting Social Security. The tool will then estimate the amount you’ll collect in today’s dollars over your lifetime if you claim benefits as planned—and show how much more you might collect by claiming at a different age. If you’re married, the tool will show how you and your spouse might maximize lifetime benefits by better coordinating when each of you claims. Another nifty feature: you can see how the projections changed depending on whether your life expectancy exceeds or falls short of average.

While this tool is a good way to start thinking about how and when you might claim Social Security benefits, the amount of money at stake is large enough that you may want to hire an adviser to help you with this decision or go to a Social Security claiming service, such as Maximize My Social Security or Social Security Solutions, that, for a fee, will help you devise a strategy.

5. Will You Have Enough To Retire? I know that no matter what I or anyone else says, some people simply aren’t going to spend more than a minute with any tool. If you’re one of those people—or you just want a quick update to see if you’re on the path to a secure retirement—this tool is for you.

Just enter your age, the age you expect to exit your job, the amount, if any, you have saved so far, the percentage of income you’re saving each year and the tool will immediately estimate the amount you’ll need at retirement and the amount you’re projected to have. At a glance, you can quickly see whether you’re likely to have an adequate nest egg if you continue on your current path. If it appears you’re falling short, you can see how your chances improve by, say, saving a higher percentage of pay or delaying retirement a few years (or both). My only gripe about this tool: I wish it couched its estimates in sustainable annual income in retirement rather than giving you your retirement “number.”

Are there other worthwhile free tools that can help you better plan for retirement? Sure, you’ll find at least a dozen more listed in RDR’s Retirement Toolbox, including one that will show you how much guaranteed lifetime income a specific sum of savings might generate, another that can help you decide between a traditional and Roth IRA and one that can help you compare the cost of living in different cities.

But to create an overall retirement strategy and monitor it to make sure you stay on track, you can start with these five.

Walter Updegrave is the editor of RealDealRetirement.com. If you have a question on retirement or investing that you would like Walter to answer online, send it to him at walter@realdealretirement.com.

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A: I’m as pro-privacy and as anti-Prohibition as they come, but what you do on work property during work hours is your employer’s business. And as a manager yourself, you have a higher level of obligation than if you weren’t.

So. Is there a safety issue? Would you report them if it were alcohol? Would you want to know if they’d been your own employees? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then yeah, you do need to tell their manager what you saw. (You can ask them to leave your name out of it if at all possible, since you need to work with these guys.) If the answer to all three questions is no, then I’m not going to tell you that you’re obligated to take this on.

Q: After receiving a job offer, I requested more money, a specific schedule, and asked about benefits. After a few email exchanges with HR, I realized their health insurance is one of the ones exploiting the ignorance of folks and claiming loopholes where there are none for my form of birth control. I would’ve had to pay $80/month just for birth control. I responded to the HR person to thank them for all their help and let them know the insurance would not meet my needs.

I called the manager, and she said she thought I’d rescinded my application (!), adding that she’d received my email to HR and thought I wasn’t interested. I was very confused, given that at no point did I say I didn’t want the job; I simply said the insurance did not meet my needs. She had offered the job to someone else. She said, “Do you want to work for somewhere that can’t pay you well and won’t give you the schedule you want?” I informed her at that point I didn’t even know what the schedule was and hadn’t been informed what the final offer was, given that no one actually communicated with me at all during this time. After asking “Is the offer rescinded for me then?” about twice, she finally said that the offer was no longer available to me.

My partner wants me to try to speak to their manager/supervisor and let them know what happened. Thoughts?

A: I wrote back to this letter-writer and asked, “When you told them that the insurance wouldn’t meet your needs, what exactly did you say in that email? And what were you expecting to happen after that?”

The letter-writer responded:

I thanked them and then said the insurance wouldn’t meet my needs. I didn’t say “so I won’t take it”; there was no vague language like that at all.

I actually didn’t have all the details of the offer yet, like what days I would work or whether they wanted to pay me more. The email was sent to HR, not the manager, although I found out later it was forwarded to her.

So, here’s the thing: A flat statement that an element of an offer “won’t meet your needs” is potentially going to be interpreted as “this offer won’t work for me.”

Now, the employer handled this poorly in several ways: They should have responded to you and either told you that the offer was final, including the health insurance, or attempted to negotiate with you. Instead, they prematurely assumed you were turning down the offer and just moved on. They also should have responded to your phone calls after this happened.

So I’m not defending the employer here.

But you didn’t handle this beautifully either. If I made an offer to someone and after discussing an element of it, they flatly told me that it wouldn’t meet their needs, I’d be wondering why they didn’t follow that up with something else, like “So unfortunately I won’t be able to accept” or “Would you be able to go up on salary to make up for the hit on insurance?” If they didn’t do that and just told me it wouldn’t meet their needs, I’d be left pretty nonplussed.

It also sounds like you were assuming that your emails with HR weren’t part of the official discussion about the offer, since they weren’t going to the hiring manager, but during offer discussions, HR and managers are very much in communication and are sharing their discussions with the candidate with each other. What you say to HR is assumed to be as much a part of your response to the offer as what you say to the hiring manager.

The hiring manager explained her thinking when she said, “Do you want to work for somewhere that can’t pay you well and won’t give you the schedule you want?” At that point, she’s thinking: “We already talked about the fact that the pay is below market. We’re not going to be able to give you the schedule you wanted. And now you’re saying that the health insurance doesn’t meet your needs. This isn’t the right match. I want to hire someone who’s going to be happy about the offer and not feel like working here is a hardship.”

Again, she should have closed the loop with you after you had your conversation with HR. She shouldn’t have ducked your calls. She should have been straight with you. But I can’t totally blame her for concluding that this wasn’t a great pairing for either of you.

As for your partner’s suggestion to go over the manager’s head and complain: That’s not going to get you anywhere. In the employer’s eyes, you’re going to be the candidate who said the offer wasn’t acceptable and then was upset when they moved on to someone else.

Going forward, I’d just make a particular point of being really clear when you’re negotiating. If you say an offer (or a piece of an offer) doesn’t work for you but you want to keep talking about ways to resolve that, you need to say that second part explicitly. Otherwise, people may assume you’re walking away.

Note: Some questions have been edited for length.

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A: Millions of workers are in the same boat. One-quarter of full-time employees are at companies that don’t offer a retirement plan, according to government data. The situation is most common at small firms: Only 50% of workers at companies with fewer than 100 employees have 401(k)s vs. 82% of workers at medium and large companies.

Certainly, 401(k)s are one of the best ways to save for retirement. These plans let you make contributions directly from your paycheck, and you can put away a large amount ($18,000 in 2015 for those 49 and younger), which can grow tax sheltered.

But there are retirement savings options beyond the 401(k) that also offer attractive tax benefits, says Ryan P. Tuttle, a certified financial planner at Connecticut Wealth Management in Farmington, Ct.

Since you’re just getting started, your first step is to get a handle on your spending and cash flow, which will help you determine how much you can really afford to put away for retirement. If you have a lot of high-rate debt—say, student loans or credit cards—you should also be paying that down. But if you have to divert cash to pay off loans, you won’t be able to put away a lot for savings.

That doesn’t mean you should wait to put money away for retirement. Even if you can only save a small amount, perhaps $50 or $100 a week, do it now. The earlier you get going, the more time that money will have to compound, so even a few dollars here or there can make a big difference in two or three decades.

You can give an even bigger boost to your savings by opting for a tax-sheltered savings plan like an Individual Retirement Account (IRA), which protects your gains from Uncle Sam, at least temporarily.

These come in two flavors: traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs. In a traditional IRA, you pay taxes when you withdraw the money in retirement. Depending on your income, you may also qualify for a tax deduction on your IRA contribution. With a Roth IRA, it’s the opposite. You put in money after paying taxes but you can withdraw it tax free once you retire.

The downside to IRAs is that you can only stash $5,500 away each year, for those 49 and younger. And to make a full contribution to a Roth, your modified adjusted gross income must be less than $131,000 a year if you’re single or $193,000 for those married filing jointly.

If your pay doesn’t exceed the income limit, a Roth IRA is your best option, says Tuttle. When you’re young and your income is low, your tax rate will be lower. So the upfront tax break you get with a traditional IRA isn’t as big of a deal.

Ideally, you’ll contribute the maximum $5,5000 to your IRA. But if you don’t have a chunk of money like that, have funds regularly transferred from your bank account to an IRA until you reach the $5,500. You can set up an IRA account easily with a low-fee provider such as Vanguard, Fidelity or T. Rowe Price.

Choose low-cost investments such as index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs); you can find choices on our Money 50 list of recommended funds and ETFs. Most younger investors will do best with a heavier concentration in stocks than bonds, since you’ll want growth and you have time to ride out market downturns. Still, your asset allocation should be geared to your individual risk tolerance.

If you end up maxing out your IRA, you can stash more money in a taxable account. Look for tax-efficient investments that generate little or no taxable gains—index funds and ETFs, again, may fill the bill.

Getting an early start in retirement savings is smart. But you should also be investing in your human capital. That means continuing to get education and adding to your skills so your earnings rise over time. Your earnings grow most quickly in those first decades of your career. “The more you earn, the more you can put away for retirement,” says Tuttle. As you move on to better opportunities—with any luck—you’ll land at a company that offers a great 401(k) plan, too.

Do you have a personal finance question for our experts? Write to AskTheExpert@moneymail.com.

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Survey participants are asked to rate grocery chains on attributes like Courteous Service and One-Stop Shopping, and Market Force compiles the data into what it calls a Composite Loyalty Index, meant to gauge overall consumer satisfaction and the likelihood of recommending the retailer to others. Trader Joe’s may not be the go-to spot for one-stop shopping, but for the past few years, it has ranked at or near the top of shopper ratings for attributes such as Courteous Service, Inviting Atmosphere, Low Prices, Cleanliness, and Fast Checkouts. That’s given the grocery chain the top ranking three years and running.

Publix’s high scores for courteous employees, speedy checkouts, and cleanliness helped the Florida-based supermarket chain nab the #2 slot in the Market Force study. The third-highest grocery chain, meanwhile, is Aldi, the exceptionally low-price, no-frills, generic-brand sibling of Trader Joe’s. WinCo Foods, another emerging low-price chain, and Costco received the highest ratings for value alongside Aldi.

This past spring, Consumer Reports’ study on the nation’s best supermarkets also placed Trader Joe’s and Publix in the top three, though it named Wegmans as the overall best grocery chain. (Wegmans wasn’t featured in the Market Force survey.)

One other notable nugget from both surveys is that Walmart is singled out for two reasons: It is the biggest and most visited of all grocery stores, and it receives the lowest ratings from shoppers.

That is, of course, how health care is sometimes sold in the United States. You want to know the price of your surgery? OK, but that doesn’t include the operating room, the anesthesiologist or the pathologist . . . they’ll be billing you separately.

But things are beginning to change, partly because Americans are now demanding answers. Motivated by high-deductible health plans and other health care changes, we want to know what we are paying for, and whether the services we receive are competitively priced. And the health care world is responding.

Stephen D. Neeleman, MD, founder and vice chair of HealthEquity, which offers health care savings and spending accounts, says many consumers don’t yet know how to negotiate for the best prices.

And to understand how to work within that system, it’s important to know a few things. First, hospitals may bill for about twice what they actually expect to receive, he says. Networks with negotiating power have agreements with the health care providers that allow them to pay less than the price you’ll see on your bill. So the amount you are billed can depend on whether you have insurance and which network you’re in. Different people pay different prices for the same service. Why can’t you get the best discount? The good news is, you may be able to. Here are some of Neeleman’s tips.

1. Offer a lower lump sum cash payment instead of payment in monthly installments. Yes, they give up a little money, but they are assured of payment and that there will be no need to write off the bill or send it to collections.

2. Talk to the right person. The right person is typically the office manager, and you can open the conversation with, “I’m here, and I’m ready to pay. I realize there are other patients that get better discounts because they are in bigger networks. I want the best deal you give anyone if I pay right now.” Even if your plan has a negotiated rate that is on the high side, the health care provider is free to charge you less than that, Neeleman said.

3. Call at the right time. The right time is as far ahead of your procedure as you can. Having surgery? There can be a dramatic difference in what facilities charge. You have time to find out where your surgeon performs surgery and if having it done at facility X on Tuesday is cheaper than having it done at facility Y on Wednesday, you’ll want to know that. Explain that you want to understand how the charges are determined because you will be paying for a lot of your expenses yourself. (Neeleman said you may be surprised to discover that many conditions don’t require emergency treatment, citing an example of a patient who, on a doctor’s advice, flew cross-country with a complex fracture so that she could be treated within her network, for a much lower price.)

4. Request that your services and procedures be recoded and verified for accuracy. You can look online to check the meanings of the CPT codes. Make sure those agree with what you believe the diagnoses and services were, and ask questions if they do not. Mistakes happen. Neeleman compares it to when grocery store cashiers keyed in prices and now when items are scanned. There is no scanning of medical procedures, and you need to check your bills at least as carefully as your mother checked her grocery receipts.

5. Know what the cost should be before making any payment. Your insurance company may have a tool to help you figure it out. You can find similar information here:

• clearhealthcosts.com
• healthcarebluebook.com
• newchoicehealth.com

6. Don’t pay your bill right away. Give yourself time to be sure the bill is accurate, checking codes and expected prices carefully. However, you do want to pay on time. Medical bills can affect your credit. If you don’t pay, the account may be turned over to collections. (In fact, try to figure out which providers should be sending you bills, and ask questions if you don’t get one. Even bills you never received can wind up as collection accounts.)

7. Be nice. Understand that patients and providers who actually know what things cost is a fairly new phenomenon. So ask rather than demand, and let them know that you’re looking for a solution that will benefit both parties. Your mother was right: It pays to be polite.

Health care is changing, Neeleman said, but it’s slow. In some cases, charges are now being bundled so you DO know the final cost of a procedure. But it’s a whole new world. He compares it to being an early buyer of a Model T — you have the car, but where are the roads? Where are the gas stations? Concerned consumers are forcing a new transparency, though, and that can only be good in the long run.

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When the Wells report was first released and Tom Brady was essentially portrayed as villain who must have at least been “generally aware” of improprieties involving the deflating of footballs for a playoff game, the consensus was that Brady’s “legacy” would be a little tainted. He’d likely be suspended, or at least face a fine. Some predicted that Brady jersey sales would plummet too.

One day after the NFL suspended Brady, however, it looks like the effect on Brady merchandise sales is just the opposite. The sports apparel specialist Fanatics.com is reporting that since Monday, when the suspension was announced, Brady gear sales are up 100%.

As of Tuesday, the site’s top-selling NFL jerseys belong to Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston, the #2 and #1 pick, respectively, in the most recent NFL draft. Holding the site’s #3 spot is 37-year-old, four-time Super Bowl champion New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Prior to the suspension, Brady had the sixth-most gear sales on the site.

Apparently, it isn’t simply fans in New England who are scooping up Brady gear after the suspension. Fanatics.com says that fans in 22 states have purchased Brady merchandise over the past day, with Massachusetts, Florida, California, Washington, and Michigan recording the most sales.

It’s also worth noting that while the NFL may not seem to be happy with Brady of late, the official NFL Shop doesn’t seem to have a problem with him; the shop currently lists 127 Brady-related items for sale.

The Swedish furniture company is also known for quirky marketing ploys. Last summer, an IKEA in Sydney, Australia, hosted a contest in which three families were allowed to spend the night. The winners also received perks like a communal Swedish meal and one-of-a-kind wakeup calls ranging from the bedside performance of a full orchestra to the arrival of a bundle of soft puppies available for cuddling.

Part of the Sydney package was breakfast in bed—an amenity that features quite prominently in IKEA’s latest whimsical PR move. From Monday to Wednesday next week (May 18-20), the Swedish furniture giant is opening a “zzzany pop-up” in East London dubbed the Breakfast in Bed Café.

Instead of tables, customers reserve single or double beds and are served a Scandinavian breakfast that includes pastries, juice, and coffee. Breakfast is served from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m.; from noon to 3 p.m. the beds are reserved strictly for napping. Sleep specialists will be on hand to help customers maximize their slumber time.

It’s all available for free for those who manage to get reservations. To do so, you must email IKEAbreakfastinbed@hopeandglorypr.com.

As for what IKEA gets out of this, well, beyond the publicity (“Var sa god,” we’re pretty sure that’s “You’re welcome” in Swedish), the store presumably gets to expose plenty of potential paying customers in London to its beds, comforters, and other products. There will be plenty of IKEA merchandise on hand at the pop-up, naturally.

Note that while IKEA may welcome customers to take naps in its stores, and on rare occasions even welcomes them to breakfast in bed, there are limits to what’s acceptable in retail locations. For instance, IKEA frowns upon games of hide and seek in its stores, at least ones involving tens of thousands of participants.

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“Here’s a model of saving for retirement that’s guaranteed to fail: Decide at the end of every month how much you want to save. You’ll have spent a lot of the money by then,” Thaler said. “Instead, the way to really save is to put the money away in a 401(k) even before you get it, via a payroll deduction.”

A new study published by Psychological Science has other insights about how to boost savings. In this instance, the trick isn’t turning your brain off but tweaking the way you think about savings goals. The gist is that you must think about the future as now, rather than, well, way off in the future. And the way to go about this is to consider deadlines for your goals in terms of days rather than years.

“The simplified message that we learned in these studies is if the future doesn’t feel imminent, then, even if it’s important, people won’t start working on their goals,” said Daphna Oyserman, co-author of the study and co-director of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center. “If you see it as ‘today’ rather than on your calendar for sometime in the future, you’re not going to put it off.”

In one part of the study, hundreds of participants were asked about when they would start saving for their (theoretical) newborn child’s college education. Some were told they had 18 years to reach this goal, while others heard their deadline would arrive in 6,570 days. These are the exact same amounts of time, yet the people who thought about the deadline in terms of days said they would start saving four times sooner than those who considered the event in years. A similar experiment concerning retirement savings yielded equally compelling results, indicating that thinking in days makes goals seem more imminent—and kicks people into action much, much sooner.

The takeaways don’t apply just to savings, but to sidestepping procrastination in order to reach goals at work or school as well. Tricking yourself into thinking about goals in terms of days rather than years, Oyserman said, “may be useful to anyone needing to save for retirement or their children’s college, to start working on a term paper or dissertation, pretty much anyone with long-term goals or wanting to support someone who has such goals.”

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