The model, interactive

Cost-of-Aging Calculator

Most cost-of-living tools price a 35-year-old's groceries. This one prices the curve that actually breaks expat retirements: healthcare rising with age, private cover stepping up at 70 and again at 75, the long-term-care tail, and your income's local value drifting down. Every number below is an editable assumption — set them to your own.

Your situation City Current age Liquid capital you can draw down (USD) Net annual income that continues (USD) Pension or drawdown floor, before indexation. Income indexation % / yr (COLA) 0 = a frozen pension — the trap a UK state pension falls into in Thailand, never uprated. Set it near your inflation rate for an indexed income: US Social Security, or a UK pension in the Philippines or another country that still uprates it.

Assumptions — edit these Baseline living cost / month (USD) Private health cover now / month (USD) Stepped ×1.5 at 65, ×2.4 at 70, ×4 at 75 in the model.

General inflation % Medical inflation %

Include a long-term-care tail

LTC cost / year (USD) LTC begins at age

Model only — no figure here is a sourced quotation. Read the pieces that document each curve:

Methodology & sources — the short version

Year by year to 95: living cost compounds at general inflation plus any FX drift; private cover compounds at the medical trend and steps up with age; the long-term-care tail compounds once it begins; income grows at the indexation rate you set — defaulting to zero, the frozen-pension case. Capital runs down until the year it goes negative.

Dated anchors behind the defaults — all editable:

Medical trend ~11%/yr (Aon Global Medical Trend Rates, 2026). The 7% UI default is a deliberately conservative floor — raise it toward the sourced band.
FX levels from the U.S. Federal Reserve (FRED) USD/THB and USD/PHP series, kept as dated ledgers on this site.
Frozen-vs-uprated pension rule from gov.uk — income defaults to 0% indexation (frozen) because that is the trap, but it is editable: a UK pension in a reciprocal country and US Social Security both carry a cost-of-living rise, so set indexation toward your inflation rate.
The 70 / 75 insurance step from observed international-insurer age-banding (see the insurance-cliff piece).
City baselines and care costs are illustrative starting points cross-referenced from cost-of-living aggregators — not quotes.

The full model — every assumption, scenario, and per-figure source with verification dates — is kept in this site's data sidecar (content/data/cost-of-aging.yml), and the FX and CPI series are published as open data under /data.