What does your savings rate buy you?

Raising the share you invest does two things at once. It puts more in, and it lowers the number you are aiming at, because the target is built from what you spend. That is why the timeline above moves so hard when you drag the share slider and barely moves when you change the pay. Work the algebra through and the income term divides out of the answer entirely.

A bigger paycheck still helps in every way that matters day to day. It just does not shorten this particular timeline on its own, unless the raise goes into the investing side rather than the spending side.

This is arithmetic and not a plan. It assumes a steady real return, a spending level that holds, and a withdrawal rate that works. Real returns arrive out of order, and a bad decade early does more damage than the same decade later, which this does not model at all.

The withdrawal rate is a rule of thumb, not a law. It came out of studies of a particular stretch of US history. Slide it down to 3% and watch the years move, because that uncertainty is real and it belongs on the screen rather than buried in a footnote.

Not in here: taxes, health insurance before Medicare, kids, a mortgage getting paid off, social security, or the fact that almost nobody holds one savings rate for thirty years. Treat the number as a direction rather than a date.