FIRE calculators
Financial independence is one number and one date. Four calculators to strike them — the target your spending sets, the balance that coasts, the portfolio part-time work replaces, and the years your savings rate costs.
The independence counter
Financial Independence
- 15 FIRE Number & Date The portfolio your spending needs, and the year your savings rate delivers it.
- 16 Coast FIRE The balance that finishes the job on compounding alone, with contributions stopped.
- 17 Barista FIRE What part-time income takes off the target — and how many years it buys back.
- 18 Savings Rate to FI Years to independence from your savings rate alone. The salary cancels out.
The one calculation underneath all four
FIRE number = annual spending ÷ withdrawal rate Every page in this section is that line, asked differently. Coast FIRE discounts it backwards to today. Barista FIRE subtracts the part of your spending a wage covers. The savings rate calculator solves it for time instead of money.
The consequence worth internalising is which input it reads. The target is set by spending, not earning. At a 4% withdrawal rate, every $1,000 a year you permanently remove from your budget takes $25,000 off the number — and does it immediately, before you have saved anything extra. A raise does nothing for the target at all unless you decline to spend it.
The flavours, weighed
The names describe budgets, not strategies — the arithmetic is identical in every row. Targets shown at a 4% withdrawal rate.
| Flavour | Annual spending | Target at 4% | Years from zero at 50% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lean FIREA deliberately small budget — often a paid-off home and no dependents. | $30,000 | $750,000 | 16.6 |
| Regular FIRERoughly the median US household budget, carried indefinitely. | $50,000 | $1,250,000 | 16.6 |
| Chubby FIREComfortable rather than careful; travel and slack in the budget. | $100,000 | $2,500,000 | 16.6 |
| Fat FIRENo meaningful constraint on spending in retirement. | $150,000 | $3,750,000 | 16.6 |
The last column is the same in every row on purpose. Starting from zero, the years depend on your savings rate — not on the size of the budget you are saving toward. Fat FIRE takes no longer than Lean FIRE if you keep the same share of a larger income. Why the salary cancels →
Questions people ask
What does FIRE stand for?
Financial Independence, Retire Early. In practice the two halves separate: most people who reach financial independence keep doing some kind of work, and the "retire early" half turns out to be optional. Independence is the part the arithmetic delivers.
Which FIRE calculator should I start with?
The FIRE number and date calculator, if you know roughly what you spend — it gives you the target and the timeline in one pass. If you have not tracked spending yet, start with the savings rate calculator; it needs only the share of your pay you keep.
Why do these calculators ask for a real return?
Because your spending figure is in today’s dollars. Netting inflation out of the return up front is what keeps every answer on this page in the same money you typed — no mental adjustment for what $50,000 will mean in twenty years.
Do you store my numbers?
No. Every calculation runs in your browser and nothing is transmitted. If you sign in and choose to save a result to your ledger, that figure is stored to your account and nothing else is.
Before you trust any of it
These are arithmetic, not forecasts. They assume a constant real return arriving smoothly, which no market has ever delivered — the order returns arrive in matters as much as their average, and a bad first decade of retirement is a different event from a bad last one. They model no taxes, no Social Security, no healthcare costs, and no change in spending across a retirement that may run forty years.
Read the target as a well-founded order of magnitude and the date as a direction of travel. The guide to the 4% rule covers what the underlying research did and did not establish, and the methodology page lists the sources behind every figure on this site.