FIRE number calculator

If you plan to withdraw 4 percent of a pile in the first year and then adjust that amount for inflation, the pile has to be $1 / 0.04 = 25$ times that first-year spending. $60,000 of spending wants $1,500,000. A 3 percent withdrawal wants $1 / 0.03 \approx 33.3$ times spending; a 5 percent withdrawal wants 20 times. The withdrawal rate and the multiple are the same fact written two ways.

The 4 percent figure is a research finding about a particular historical sample of US stock and bond returns, not a law of arithmetic. This calculator will apply whatever rate you type. It will not tell you that 4 percent is safe. Safe withdrawal rates is the page that treats the 4 percent rule as a claim about history rather than as a formula.

Sequence of returns sits beside this identity and is not inside it. Two piles of $1,500,000 that earn 7 percent on average can last very different lengths of time if the bad years arrive first. The sequence of returns explorer is that picture.

Once the target is known, the wait is a savings-goal question. Starting from $50,000, adding $25,000 a year, at 7 percent a year, the closed form says 22.43 years to $1,500,000. At a 5 percent return, the same saving toward a $40,000-a-year lifestyle (a $1,000,000 pile at 4 percent) from $100,000 already saved plus $20,000 a year takes 21.10 years.

The compounding is annual, on purpose. A FIRE horizon is counted in years, and monthly precision on a 4 percent rule would be dressing. The return is constant, also on purpose, so two savings paths are comparable. A real path is a sequence, and an average return is not a compound return, which is the warning every compounding page on this site already makes.

If the current pile already covers the spending at this withdrawal rate, years to FIRE is 0. If the pile is shrinking in real terms and the saving cannot catch the target, there is no finite wait, and the calculator says so rather than printing a huge year count.

Cut spending and two things happen at once: the target pile shrinks, and the annual saving (if the cut comes from current consumption) rises. That is why a savings-rate picture, like the savings rate explorer, is often a clearer FIRE tool than a pile-size tool. The pile is a consequence of the rate. The rate is the decision.

Raising the assumed return also cuts the wait, and it is the lever a reader does not control. Typing 10 percent because that is what a chart of the last decade shows is how a 22-year wait becomes a 16-year wait on the screen and a 22-year wait in the world. This page will apply 10 percent if you type it. It will not endorse it.

Taxes, healthcare, housing that is or is not paid off, and a state pension or Social Security benefit all change the spending the pile has to cover. A $60,000 spending figure that already nets those out is a different input from a $60,000 figure that does not. The formula cannot tell which one you typed.

Inflation is inside a real return and inside a real spending figure, or it is inside neither. Mixing a 7 percent nominal return with $60,000 of today's spending, held flat in nominal terms, understates the pile you will need. The real return calculator is the conversion. The retirement withdrawal calculator is the other end of the same identity: a pile and a rate, looking at what comes out rather than at what has to go in.