Stock Market Wealth Calculators

Long-Run Stock Returns

From 1928 through 2025, the S&P 500 returned roughly 10% a year on average (compound annual growth, dividends reinvested), compared with roughly 4.5–5% for 10-year Treasury bonds and about 3.5% for 3-month Treasury bills, according to data compiled by Aswath Damodaran at NYU Stern. Subtracting inflation leaves roughly 7% a year for stocks. Individual years ranged from large gains to losses of more than 40%.

How Long to $1 Million in the S&P 500?

Monthly investment	Years at 10%	Total contributed	Years at 7%
$300/month	33.8 years	$121,500	43.2 years
$500/month	28.9 years	$173,500	36.4 years
$1,000/month	22.5 years	$270,000	27.6 years
$2,000/month	16.5 years	$396,000	19.6 years

At 10%, investing $1,000 a month for 22.5 years means contributing $270,000; the remaining $730,000 is growth. Use the S&P 500 calculator for your own numbers, or millionaire by age to find the monthly amount for a target date.

Three Common Approaches

S&P 500 index funds. Funds that track the index hold about 500 large U.S. companies, and the cheapest charge expense ratios of a few hundredths of a percent. In his 2013 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett described instructions to put 90% of the cash he leaves his wife into a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund and 10% into short-term government bonds.

Dividend investing. Reinvesting dividends buys more shares, which pay more dividends. Note that dividends are part of total return, not extra return on top of it. Try the dividend calculator.

Stock/bond portfolios. Mixes such as 80/20 or 60/40 trade some expected return for smaller drawdowns. Model one with the portfolio calculator.

Index Funds vs. Picking Stocks

S&P Dow Jones Indices' SPIVA scorecards have consistently found that the large majority of actively managed U.S. large-cap funds trail the S&P 500 over 10- and 15-year periods. Individual stocks can beat the index by a wide margin, but picking them in advance is hard, and concentrated positions can also lose most of their value.

Crashes Happen

• 2000–2002 dot-com bust: the S&P 500 fell about 49%; it regained its prior high in 2007.
• 2007–2009 financial crisis: fell about 57%; regained its prior high in 2013.
• 2020 COVID crash: fell about 34% in five weeks; regained its high about five months later.
• 2022 bear market: fell about 25%; regained its high in January 2024.

(Price index declines from peak to trough.) Investors who kept contributing through these periods bought shares at lower prices; those who sold near the bottom often missed the recovery.

Fees Matter

Investing $500 a month for 30 years grows to about $745,000 at 8% a year but about $610,000 at 7%. A one-percentage-point annual fee can cost well over $100,000 over a working lifetime.