FIRE Calculator

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The idea is to save and invest aggressively, usually 40% to 70% of your income, until your investments are large enough to cover your living expenses indefinitely. Once your portfolio can fund your spending without you working, you've reached financial independence and can choose whether to keep working or retire.

Your FIRE number is your annual spending divided by your safe withdrawal rate. At the classic 4% rate, that's 25 times your annual spending. If you spend $40,000 a year, your FIRE number is $40,000 ÷ 0.04, or $1,000,000. Lower withdrawal rates produce larger numbers: at 3.5% you need about 29x your spending, and at 3% you need about 33x.

It depends almost entirely on your spending, not your income. Multiply your expected annual spending by 25 for a 4% withdrawal rate. Early retirees often use a more conservative 3.5% or 3% rate because their retirement could last 40 to 50 years, which raises the multiple to roughly 29x or 33x. Healthcare before Medicare and sequence-of-returns risk are the two factors that most often push the number higher.

Coast FIRE is the point where you've invested enough that, even if you never save another dollar, compound growth alone will carry your portfolio to your full FIRE number by your target retirement age. After reaching Coast FIRE, you only need to earn enough to cover current expenses. You can stop actively saving for retirement and let the existing balance grow on its own.

Barista FIRE is a hybrid where you leave full-time work but keep some part-time income, often a job that provides health insurance, like the coffee-shop role the name references. Your portfolio only has to cover the gap between your spending and your part-time income, so the portfolio target is smaller and you reach it sooner than full FIRE. It's a popular bridge for people who want to step back from full-time work before they're fully financially independent.

The 4% rule comes from research by William Bengen and the Trinity Study, which tested 30-year retirements. Early retirees planning for 40 to 50 years often lower their withdrawal rate to 3% to 3.5% to add a margin of safety, since a longer horizon gives more time for a bad sequence of returns to do damage. This calculator lets you toggle between 3%, 3.5%, 4%, and 4.5% to see how the target shifts.

Savings rate is the single biggest lever on how fast you reach FIRE, more than your investment return in the early years. Someone saving 50% of their income can reach financial independence in roughly 17 years from zero, while a 25% rate takes closer to 32 years. Most people pursuing FIRE aim for a savings rate of 40% or higher. The Time to FIRE mode shows your rate and how an extra few hundred dollars a month changes the date.

A standard retirement calculator assumes you work until your mid-60s and that Social Security and Medicare start soon after. A FIRE calculator focuses on reaching independence as early as possible and frames the goal as a multiple of spending rather than a target age. This tool adds the FIRE-specific concepts a regular calculator skips: your FIRE number, your savings rate, Coast FIRE, and Barista FIRE, all in today's dollars.