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FIRE calculator — FIRE, Lean FIRE, Fat FIRE, Coast FIRE and Barista FIRE

When can I reach financial independence?

Based on your assumptions, you could reach FIRE around
Age 52
Year 2043
16 yr 8 mo to go

All figures are in today's dollars and are estimates, not predictions. Investment returns are not guaranteed.

Target portfolio
$1,250,000
$50,000/yr ÷ 4%
Your savings rate
50%
$50,000 saved ÷ $100,000 income
Years until FIRE
16 yr 8 mo
Real (after-inflation) return
2.4%
5% return, 2.5% inflation
Income at your withdrawal rate
$50,000/yr
What the target portfolio would fund
Portfolio in 10 years
$756,989
Today's dollars
Portfolio vs. target
Projected portfolioTarget number

The dashed line is your target number. Where the portfolio crosses it is the modeled point of financial independence.

Withdrawal rate

FIRE planning uses a withdrawal-rate assumption to estimate how much a portfolio can support each year. 4% is a common starting point, not a guarantee. Lower rates are more cautious and imply a larger portfolio.

FIRE

What is FIRE?

FIRE — Financial Independence, Retire Early — describes building a portfolio large enough that withdrawals from it could cover your living costs, so paid work becomes a choice rather than a requirement. The 'retire early' half is the part people notice; the financial independence half is the part that does the work.

The strategy has no membership card and no fixed spending level. What defines it is the deliberate, sustained gap between what you earn and what you spend, invested over a long enough period that compounding starts contributing more than your contributions do.

How FIRE works

You choose a spending level you expect to need each year, convert it into a portfolio target using a withdrawal-rate assumption, then project your current investments and annual savings forward until the portfolio reaches that target.

Because the target is set by spending and the timeline is set by the gap between income and spending, spending is the single most powerful input. Lowering it raises your savings and lowers the finish line at the same time.

How your result is calculated

Your FIRE number is the annual spending your portfolio must cover divided by your withdrawal rate. Any other retirement income you enter is subtracted from spending first.

Your portfolio is projected monthly in today's dollars at a real return of (1 + return) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1, with your annual savings added each month. The modeled FIRE age is the first month the balance reaches the target.

What could change your result?

Returns that arrive lower, or in a worse order, than the steady average used here. Spending that rises with lifestyle rather than only with inflation. Career interruptions, taxes, and healthcare costs, none of which are modeled.

The withdrawal rate assumption itself is a judgment call, not a constant. Moving from 4% to 3.5% raises the target by roughly 14% and typically pushes the date back by years.

Read the full FIRE guide below →

Explore the different types of FIRE

FIRE is not one plan. The five approaches below all rest on the same arithmetic — a portfolio, a withdrawal rate, and a spending level — but they answer different questions and suit different lives. Every section here stays on the page regardless of which mode you have selected above, because deciding which lens fits you is most of the work.

FIRE — financial independence, retire early

Standard FIRE asks when your investments could cover your living costs entirely. You pick a sustainable withdrawal rate, divide your annual spending by it, and that is the portfolio you are aiming at. At 4%, spending of $50,000 implies $1,250,000; at 3.5% it implies about $1,430,000.

The timeline is governed almost entirely by your savings rate, because the savings rate simultaneously determines how fast the portfolio grows and how big it needs to be. Someone saving 15% of income is typically looking at a working career of roughly four decades. At 40% it is often around two. At 65% it can compress toward a decade. Those are illustrative ranges from the underlying maths, not promises.

Two people with identical salaries can therefore have completely different FIRE dates, and the person who earns less can easily arrive first. Income sets the ceiling on what is possible; spending sets almost everything else.

The most common failure mode is not a market crash — it is lifestyle inflation. Each recurring $500 a month added to a budget removes $6,000 a year from savings and adds $150,000 to the target at a 4% rate. Nothing else in the plan moves both numbers at once.

Lean FIRE — independence on a modest budget

Lean FIRE is standard FIRE with a deliberately small spending target. There is no official dollar figure that qualifies; what defines it is that the planned lifestyle costs meaningfully less than a comparable household's, which is what pulls the required portfolio down and the date forward.

The typical shape is low fixed costs: modest or paid-off housing, little or no car dependence, cooking rather than eating out, and a preference for time over consumption. Someone spending $30,000 a year needs $750,000 at a 4% withdrawal rate — a target within reach of a diligent saver on an ordinary income.

The honest trade-off is margin for error. A $750,000 portfolio produces $30,000 a year at 4%, and there is very little in that budget to cut if health insurance premiums jump or a landlord raises the rent. Lean plans are more exposed to costs that cannot be compressed, and they are more exposed to a bad first decade of returns because there is less slack to absorb it.

Two practical mitigations show up repeatedly in the community: keeping some ability to earn income after leaving full-time work, and living at the target spending level for a year before relying on it, so the number is tested rather than theoretical.

Fat FIRE — independence without cutting back

Fat FIRE builds independence around the lifestyle you actually want rather than a compressed version of it — travel, family support, generous healthcare, a home in an expensive area. The maths does not change; only the spending target does. At $120,000 of annual spending and a 4% withdrawal rate the target is $3,000,000, and at 3.5% it is roughly $3,430,000.

Reaching numbers that size usually requires a high income, equity compensation, business ownership, or a long accumulation period. That longer runway is worth planning around: over twenty or thirty years, career changes, market disappointment and shifts in what you want are all likely rather than possible.

The compensation for the larger target is genuine resilience. A portfolio sized for generous spending contains discretionary layers — travel, upgrades, gifts — that can be cut in a bad market without touching housing or food. That flexibility is a real safety mechanism, and it is why some planners consider a fat plan at 4% safer in practice than a lean plan at 3.5%.

Taxes deserve more attention here than in the other modes, because withdrawal amounts are larger and more likely to sit in higher brackets. Nothing on this page models tax, so a fat plan in particular should be checked against real tax assumptions.

Coast FIRE — when you can stop saving for retirement

Coast FIRE reverses the question. Instead of asking when your portfolio will reach your number, it asks whether what you have already invested could grow into your retirement portfolio on its own, with no further contributions, by the age you plan to retire.

The calculation is a discount rather than a projection: take the retirement portfolio you want, and divide it by (1 + your real return) raised to the number of years remaining. A 30-year-old targeting $1,250,000 at 65, assuming a 5% real return, needs roughly $290,000 invested today. The same person at 45 would need about $600,000, and at 55 about $975,000 — the threshold rises sharply as compounding time runs out.

Reaching it does not mean you can stop working. You still need income for today's living costs. What it means is that the retirement-saving portion of your budget has been pre-funded, which is what makes a career change, a sabbatical, a lower-paying but better job, or a shift to part-time hours financially defensible years before full independence.

Because there are no contributions cushioning the ride, Coast FIRE is unusually sensitive to the return assumption over a long horizon. It is also a state under today's assumptions rather than a permanent achievement: raise your retirement spending target or bring your retirement date forward and the threshold moves with it. Modelling it at a lower real return is the simplest way to see how much cushion you actually have.

Barista FIRE — part-time work, part-time portfolio

Barista FIRE describes leaving full-time work before the portfolio can carry your whole lifestyle, and covering the difference with part-time or lower-stress employment. The name refers to jobs that historically offered health benefits at part-time hours, which is frequently the real constraint rather than the wage.

The arithmetic is a simple gap calculation. Subtract expected part-time income from desired annual spending, and only the remainder has to come from the portfolio. A $60,000 lifestyle with $25,000 of part-time earnings leaves a $35,000 gap, which at 4% implies $875,000 rather than the $1,500,000 that full independence would require — a difference that can be worth many years.

Because the target falls roughly in proportion to what you can earn, this mode is very sensitive to the income assumption. Part-time work also lets a portfolio keep growing during the years it is not being drawn on, which quietly strengthens the plan.

The risk is concentration. If the plan only works while that income continues, then health, a local job market, or an employer's benefits policy becomes a single point of failure. A common stress test is to re-run the model with half the part-time income, and to ask what the plan looks like if the work has to stop entirely at some point.

Comparing the five FIRE strategies

The table below is a quick orientation, not a recommendation. Which strategy is relevant depends on what you want your life to cost, how much certainty you want, and whether you expect to keep earning at all. Many people move between them over time — coasting first, then part-time work, then full independence.

FIRE typeMain goalPrimary question
FIREPortfolio covers your full lifestyleWhen can I reach financial independence?
Lean FIREIndependence sooner, on a modest budgetWhen can I reach independence with a leaner lifestyle?
Fat FIREIndependence without reducing your standard of livingWhen can I reach independence at a higher level of spending?
Coast FIREStop saving for retirement, keep covering today's costsHow much do I need invested today to Coast FIRE?
Barista FIREPart-time work covers part of your spendingHow much investment income do I need alongside part-time work?

How this calculator models your plan

Everything runs in today's dollars. Your nominal return is converted into a real return with the formula (1 + return) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1, so a 5% return with 2.5% inflation becomes roughly 2.44% real. Contributions and spending are assumed to keep pace with inflation, which is what makes the portfolio line and the target line directly comparable.

The accumulation modes — FIRE, Lean, Fat and Barista — compound monthly and add one twelfth of your annual savings each month, then report the first month the balance reaches the target. Coast FIRE does not project contributions at all: it discounts the retirement target back to today at the same real return.

Returns are applied as one steady rate rather than a realistic sequence, so the model cannot show sequence-of-returns risk. Taxes, fees, healthcare shocks and career interruptions are not modeled either. The most useful way to use the page is to change the assumption you are least confident about and watch how far the answer moves.

The 4% rule and withdrawal rates

The 4% figure comes from 1990s research — most famously William Bengen's work and the subsequent Trinity Study — into historical U.S. stock and bond returns, which found that an initial withdrawal of about 4% of a portfolio, increased annually for inflation, generally survived a thirty-year retirement.

Three caveats matter for FIRE specifically. It studied one country's history, and other markets looked worse. It tested thirty years, while an early retirement may need forty-five or fifty. And it assumed rigid inflation-adjusted spending, whereas real retirees adjust — which in practice is one of the strongest defenses a plan has.

That is why the calculator lets you change the rate rather than fixing it at 4%. Lower rates are more conservative and imply larger portfolios; the comparison row above the education section shows exactly what each choice costs in target size and modeled date.

Taxes, healthcare and the parts this model leaves out

Taxes are the largest omission. They affect how much you can save, what your investments net, and what each withdrawal actually buys. A practical workaround inside this calculator is to enter savings as an after-tax figure and to set a spending target that includes the tax you expect to pay on withdrawals. Account order and account type matter a great deal, but the rules vary by country and situation and this page cannot give tax advice.

Healthcare is the second. For anyone retiring before state or employer coverage begins, it can be one of the largest single line items in the budget, and it is also one of the least predictable. Building it explicitly into your spending target, rather than hoping it fits in the margin, is the conservative approach.

Finally, if you expect Social Security, a pension, or rental income, enter it under other retirement income — the model subtracts it from your spending target before dividing by the withdrawal rate. Be conservative: those benefits usually begin decades after an early retirement starts, so the portfolio still has to carry the bridge years alone.

FIRE calculator FAQs

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It describes a strategy in which a household deliberately spends well below its income, invests the difference, and builds a portfolio large enough that investment income can cover living costs. The 'retire early' half is optional — many people who reach financial independence keep working, but on their own terms.

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Financial disclaimer

This FIRE calculator and the accompanying article are provided for educational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Results are estimates based on the assumptions you enter, investment returns are not guaranteed, and actual outcomes may differ substantially. FIRE projections are especially sensitive to small changes in return, inflation, spending, and withdrawal-rate assumptions. Read the full disclaimer.