The harder part to visualize is how the value changes as you draw money out of it after retirement ... And especially how much you should withdraw per month since that requires guessing how long you'll live (I don't have this problem).
Post-retirement is definitely harder. There are also usually rules about what's allowable with the money that built up with tax relief and such. Since these rules differ from country to country even the starting point of deciding what to model is hard.
Here in Ireland I think in order to get some flexibility with a reasonably sized pension you need to buy an annuity - a guaranteed income paid from some insurance company, up to some amount.
Some day I might settle on some scenario/s to model and take on the visualization challenge... For now hopefully people - especially those who provide the services, can assess if it can be helpful!
I'm a former hardware engineer with a lot of ties to communities that include handicapped children. Happy to help reverse engineer and resuscitate these as a side-project if I can get my hands on a "dead robot".
> ZIP DIP socket
If that is referring to the picture above, my recollection is that it's a ZIF DIP socket ... We used those for writing [E][E]PROM. ZIF was zero-insertion-force.
