FIRE Calculator

FIRE — Financial Independence, Retire Early — targets a portfolio large enough that investment returns cover living expenses, making paid work optional. The standard target is 25 times annual expenses, the inverse of a 4% withdrawal rate.

Savings rate is the dominant variable, and it acts twice. A higher rate accumulates faster, and it simultaneously lowers the expenses the portfolio must eventually fund, shrinking the target itself. That double effect is why time-to-independence depends far more on savings rate than on income or investment return: someone saving half their income reaches the goal in a fraction of the time of someone saving a tenth, at any income level.

The 4% rule needs more care here than in conventional retirement planning. It was derived for roughly 30-year horizons. A retirement beginning in your forties may need to last fifty years or more, and a withdrawal rate safe over 30 years is not automatically safe over 50. Many planning for early independence use a more conservative 3 to 3.5%, which raises the multiple to roughly 28 to 33 times expenses.

Practical complications deserve planning rather than optimism. Healthcare is the largest, since early retirement means funding coverage without an employer for the years before any state provision begins. Accessing tax-advantaged retirement accounts before the standard age requires specific strategies, not just a withdrawal. Sequence-of-returns risk bites harder over a longer horizon. And the plan should survive the possibility that you return to some paid work, which is common and not a failure.

Enter your own expenses, savings rate, and expected return above. The projection is a scenario built on constant assumptions, not a forecast — treat the direction as informative and the exact date as approximate. Everything runs in your browser — no login, no upload, and no figure you enter leaves the page.