Financial independence is the point where your investments can pay for your life without a salary. The FIRE movement — Financial Independence, Retire Early — turned it into a single target: a portfolio big enough that what it safely throws off each year covers what you spend. This tool finds that number for you, then shows how many years of saving stand between you and it.
How it works
Two ideas, stacked.
First, the number. A widely used rule says you can withdraw about 4% of a portfolio per year, adjusted for inflation, and have it last a long retirement. Turn that around and your target is your annual spending ÷ 4%, which is the same as 25× your yearly expenses. Spend $40,000 and your FIRE number is $1,000,000.
Second, the time. Starting from what you’ve already invested, the tool adds your yearly savings and grows the balance at your expected real return — the return after inflation — year by year, until it reaches the number. Everything is in today’s dollars, so the answer is in money you could actually spend.
An example
Take the values already filled in: $50,000 invested, $40,000 a year in expenses, $20,000 saved each year, a 5% real return, and a 4% withdrawal rate. Your FIRE number is $1,000,000, and at that pace you reach it in about 24 years. Add your age and the tool also tells you how old you’d be. Now nudge the inputs: trimming expenses cuts the target and frees up more to save, so it pulls the date in from both ends — which is why spending less is the most powerful lever in FIRE, more than chasing a higher return.
A note on that 5%: across the rest of this site the investment examples use about 7%, a typical nominal stock return. Here the return is real — after inflation — so ~7% nominal becomes roughly 5% real once you subtract about 2% inflation. Same world, just measured in today’s dollars to match your future expenses.
The part that matters
This is a planning sketch, not a guarantee. Three honest things:
- The 4% rule is a rule of thumb from history. It rests on U.S. market data over 30-year retirements, and even then it wasn’t flawless across every portfolio. It also ignores taxes and fees. If you want a safer margin — or you’re planning for a retirement much longer than 30 years, as early retirees are — use a lower withdrawal rate; the number rises, but so does your cushion.
- A constant real return hides sequence risk. Real markets don’t deliver a smooth 5% — and a bad stretch early in retirement does more damage than the average suggests. The year-by-year path is the shape of the journey, not a forecast of any single future.
- Your expenses are the engine. The number is built entirely on what you spend, so an honest expense figure matters more than a clever return assumption. Get that right first.
Change the values above to your own — what you’ve saved, what you spend, what you can put away — and watch how the date moves. The surprise is usually how much pulling down expenses, not pushing up returns, brings independence closer.