Stuart Matthews

Charlie Stone

I am the designer and developer of the Pralana Retirement Calculator. I’m a retired electrical engineer, systems integrator and program manager. I received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and had a rewarding career in the defense industry with Bendix, Rockwell International and Raytheon, retiring in early 2009. I’m married, have two grown and successful kids, have been a private pilot for over 25 years, enjoy hiking and backpacking and have designed and personally built our retirement home.

The Pralana Retirement Calculator project began in January 2011 after I read an article in Consumer Reports that reviewed on-line retirement calculators. Having built my own rather primitive “calculator” (actually an Excel spreadsheet) to plan out the last 10 years of my working life and thereafter, I read the article with great interest and then went on-line to check out CR’s recommendations. Wow, what a disappointment! So, with a basic idea, plenty of free time and always up for a challenge, I set out with an idea to provide a more capable alternative to on-line retirement calculators and had PRC 1.0 and the initial website ready to go within weeks. But new ideas kept flooding in and I kept improving it, little by little. Now, over 7000 work hours later, the original tool has incrementally blossomed into the highly complex and capable tool it has become today.

I made it my mission to develop a robust life cycle model that concurrently models most of the numerous interacting forces that govern our financial lives and then presents its users with useful, verifiable and easy-to-understand outputs they can use to make the financial decisions on which their futures will depend and to better understand the sensitivity of their plan to a host of variables. After more than 10 years of iterative refinement, that has resulted in the Excel-based Pralana Gold 2024. In early 2022, I decided to look for a partner to develop a web-based version of Pralana Gold and was blessed to find Charlie Stone. He has undertaken the monumental task of replicating and improving upon the Pralana Gold design in the web-based product we call Pralana Online.

I am Charlie Stone, principal website developer of Pralana Online. My career included five years in the US Army Corp of Engineers and twenty-one years in the mortgage industry as an IT and marketing professional.  After retiring in 2018, I cofounded a mortgage advisory website startup. In 2022, I became a Pralana Retirement Calculator customer and soon began working with Stuart to build Pralana Online. I have B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the U.S. Military Academy and M.S. in Engineering Management from the University of Missouri. Originally from North Carolina, I have three grown children. My wife and I live in Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. When not working on Pralana Online, I am a golfer, landscaper, and primary walker for our two golden retrievers. 

Replicating the feature-rich PRC Gold (Excel) has been both very enjoyable and challenging. I look forward to the continued evolution of the Pralana Retirement Calculator and making it even more useful and accessible to those seeking a great personal financial modeling tool.