When can you retire?

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It's the idea that you're 'retired' the moment your investments can pay your bills for life — not when you hit a specific birthday. This calculator takes three things you already know (what you spend, what you save, and what you've got invested) and answers one question: given those numbers, how many years until the math works? It then shows the year-by-year path so the number isn't a black box.

We run a year-by-year simulation. Each year your portfolio earns your expected return, we add your yearly savings, and we check whether a safe withdrawal (your withdrawal rate × portfolio) covers your annual expenses. Year 1 is the first full year after you start, not the current calendar year. The 'years to FI' value is the fractional year in which your portfolio first crosses the finish line — so 12.4 years means late in year 12.

The 4% rule is a rough planning heuristic: if you withdraw 4% of your starting portfolio each year (adjusted for inflation), historical US data suggests you have a strong chance of not running out of money over a 30-year retirement. It comes from the Trinity Study. It's not a guarantee — sequence-of-returns risk, longer retirements, and very different markets can all break it. Many early retirees prefer 3.25%–3.75% for longer horizons; you can change the withdrawal rate in the calculator to see the impact.

In the first decade, your savings rate dominates. It sets both how fast you accumulate and how little you need (because a lower cost of living means a smaller FIRE number). Investment returns matter more the longer your horizon: someone aiming to retire in 30 years is extremely sensitive to return assumptions; someone aiming for 8 years is not. The savings-rate chart in this calculator makes that tradeoff visible.

Use a real return (after inflation) and you can treat every number on the page as today's dollars — expenses, portfolio, FIRE number, all of it. The default 5% return here is meant as a 'real' return. If you prefer to enter a nominal return like 8%, mentally convert your expense and income inputs into future nominal dollars too, otherwise the math will disagree with itself.

FIRE-number mode asks for your monthly spending and monthly savings directly — the most natural framing if you already budget monthly. Savings-rate mode asks for your annual income and expenses and derives your savings rate from the gap. Same simulation under the hood; both will give you the same answer for equivalent inputs. Pick whichever set of numbers you have easiest access to.

No. It's a pre-tax, self-funded model designed to stay simple and easy to reason about. If you expect meaningful Social Security, a pension, or other income in retirement, you can approximate that by lowering your 'annual expenses' input by the amount those sources will cover. For tax drag, you can lower your expected return by 0.5–1%.

No. Everything runs in your browser — your income, savings, and net worth never leave your device. The only thing persisted is your light/dark theme preference, in your browser's localStorage. We use Google Tag Manager for anonymous usage analytics; see the privacy page for details.

Think of it as a sanity check, not a plan. The assumption that returns are constant every year is wrong — real markets are volatile, and the order those returns arrive in matters enormously (sequence-of-returns risk). For a real plan, run Monte Carlo simulations against historical data, model taxes, and talk to a fee-only fiduciary. This calculator is a great way to explore 'what if I saved $500/month more' intuitively, not a substitute for proper planning.