FIRE Calculator and Early Retirement Planner
When can you reach financial independence? Enter what you have, save and will spend for your FIRE year on the 4% rule, plus Coast FIRE, in today’s dollars.
| Age | Year | Contributed (yr) | Growth (yr) | Balance | % to FI |
|---|
| Data | Series | Provider |
|---|---|---|
| Safe withdrawal rate | The 4% rule (25× spending) over a roughly 30-year retirement | Trinity study |
| Long-run real returns | About 7% for a 100% stock portfolio, about 5% for a 60/40 mix | Historical US market data |
All figures are in today’s dollars, so use a real (after-inflation) return. Longer or early retirements argue for 3.25 to 3.5%. Coast FIRE assumes a target retirement age of 65 and no further contributions. Excludes Social Security, pensions and taxes on withdrawals.
Each of 1,000 paths draws an independent annual return from a normal distribution with your mean and volatility, compounding the balance while adding contributions before retirement and subtracting spending after. "Chance money lasts" is the fraction of paths that never hit zero during retirement. Real markets have fat tails, autocorrelation and sequence risk that a normal distribution understates, so treat this as a guide, not a guarantee. Results are seeded so they stay stable as you adjust inputs.
Models a starting price of $100 per share scaled to your investment. Each year, dividends are paid on shares held (growing at the dividend-growth rate), taxed if the account is taxable, and the after-tax amount buys more shares at the year-end price. The cash path holds shares constant and accumulates after-tax dividends without reinvesting. Tax drag is the value a taxable account loses versus the same holding in a tax-advantaged account. Excludes share-price volatility, fees and dividend cuts; assumes dividends stay qualified.
About this tool
This FIRE calculator works out the year work becomes optional. Enter what you have invested, what you add each month, the real return you expect and what you plan to spend each year in retirement, and it returns your financial independence number, your years to FI, your FI age and your Coast FIRE number, with the year-by-year path charted.
The engine of early retirement is the savings rate. It attacks from both sides at once: every extra dollar saved compounds toward the target while permanently shrinking the lifestyle the target must fund. That double effect is why going from a 10% to a 30% savings rate cuts decades, not years, off the timeline.
The two tabs beside the calculator pressure-test the answer. Monte Carlo runs a thousand randomized market paths to show how often the plan survives a bad sequence of returns rather than a smooth average one, and the dividend reinvestment tab compounds a starting investment at a chosen yield and dividend growth rate with every payout reinvested.
How do I calculate my FIRE number?
Divide the amount you plan to spend each year in retirement by your safe withdrawal rate. At a 4% rate that is the same as 25 times annual spending, so $40,000 of spending implies a $1,000,000 portfolio. Lower the withdrawal rate in the calculator and the number rises, which is the honest trade-off for a longer or more cautious retirement.
What is the 4% rule?
A retirement rule of thumb from the Trinity study: a portfolio can historically sustain withdrawals of about 4% of its starting value, inflation-adjusted, for 30 years. Inverted, it says you need roughly 25 times annual spending to be financially independent. The research covered 30-year windows, so for a 40 or 50 year retirement many planners model 3.25% to 3.75% instead, or plan on spending a little less in bad markets.
What is a Coast FIRE number?
The amount you would need invested today so that, even with no further contributions, compounding alone reaches your FI number by traditional retirement age. Past that point you only need to earn enough to cover current expenses, because retirement is already funded. The calculator shows it as a tick mark on the progress bar so you can see how close you are.
Can I include Social Security in a FIRE calculation?
There is no separate Social Security field, and the honest reason is that a benefit starting decades from now is a forecast, not a number. The usual workaround is to run the calculator twice: once with your full annual spending, for the years before the benefit starts, and once with the expected benefit subtracted from that spending, for the years after. The gap between the two answers tells you how much of the plan rests on the benefit arriving as expected.
What is Barista FIRE?
Covering part of your living costs with light or part-time work while the portfolio covers the rest, so you can leave a full-time career before hitting the full FI number. Model it by entering only the spending your portfolio has to fund, not your total spending, and the target and timeline both drop.
Does this work outside the US, in the UK, Canada, Australia or India?
The arithmetic is currency-agnostic, so entering your figures in pounds, dollars, rupees or anything else gives a valid answer as long as you use a real, after-inflation return. What does not travel is tax and account structure: withdrawal rules, pension access ages and state benefits differ by country, and the safe withdrawal research is based on US market history, which has been kinder than most.