Scenario tools
Financial Independence
Early retirement planning
Planning for financial independence and early retirement, often called FIRE? Estimate your target and the savings you can access before using retirement accounts.
Use today's dollars. Include living costs and your estimated taxes on portfolio withdrawals; do not add a cost again if it is already included.
Cash and taxable investments you could use before retirement accounts.
Include only new savings you could use before your chosen retirement-account access age. This model adds these deposits to accessible assets.
Enter zero if none.
This is not a guaranteed safe rate.
Enter your ages, annual spending, savings and investment assumptions to build the plan.
Two numbers answer two different questions: the portfolio target estimates the capital needed for the largest annual spending gap in your plan, while the accessible bridge estimates spending before your chosen retirement-account access age.
For a simple example, $48,000 of annual spending with no other income implies a $1.2 million target at a 4% planning withdrawal rate. Five years of that spending before account access requires $240,000 in today's dollars before bridge investment returns. Meeting the portfolio target does not automatically mean enough of that money is accessible.
The bridge calculation adds spending gaps across income start and end dates without assuming investment growth during the bridge. The extra bridge-spending field applies only until the account-access age, not automatically until Medicare eligibility. Include additional later costs in a separate plan.
Monthly savings entered here are projected into accessible assets. Do not include new deposits that must stay in restricted retirement accounts. Current retirement balances are modeled separately. The result is a planning shortcut, not an account-access eligibility check, a withdrawal schedule or a probability of retirement success.
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