Early Retirement Calculator
When can you actually retire? Enter your numbers and see the age your portfolio crosses your FIRE number, live, as you type.
How this calculator works
Retirement isn't an age, it's a number. You can stop working the day your portfolio can fund your lifestyle indefinitely. This calculator finds that day:
FIRE number = annual spending ÷ withdrawal rate
Retirement age = the age your projected portfolio crosses that number
We project your current investments plus monthly contributions forward at your real return (your expected return minus inflation and fees), so everything stays in today's money. The chart shows exactly where your net-worth curve crosses the target line.
What moves your retirement age most?
- Retirement spending. Every $1,000 less you need per year cuts your target by $25,000 (at 4%). Spending is the biggest lever by far.
- Monthly contributions. Early on, contributions dominate growth. A higher savings rate pulls the crossing point forward fast, see the savings-rate calculator for how dramatic this is.
- Returns and fees. You can't control markets, but you can control fees. A 1% annual fee can delay retirement by years over a long horizon.
A worked example
Consider someone aged 30 with $120,000 invested, adding $1,000 a month, expecting to spend $40,000 a year in retirement. Their FIRE number is $40,000 ÷ 4% = $1,000,000. At a 4% real return, the projection crosses that line around age 59.
What each lever is worth to that person
+$500/month contributions → roughly 4 years earlier
−$5,000/year retirement spending → target falls to $875,000
1% lower fees → compounds into years, not months
Notice which lever is largest. Cutting planned spending by $5,000 removes $125,000 from the target instantly, before a single extra dollar is invested. Spending is the only lever that works on both sides of the equation at once: it lowers the target and raises the amount you can invest.
Why the assumptions matter more than the answer
Any retirement date produced by any calculator, including this one, is a projection built on assumptions that will not hold exactly. A smooth 4% real return is a modelling convenience; real markets deliver lumpy sequences that average out only over decades. The value of the exercise is not the specific age it prints, it is seeing how sensitive that age is to each input.
Run it three times: once with the returns you hope for, once with returns two points lower, and once with retirement spending 20% higher than your current estimate. If the answer moves by fifteen years, your plan is fragile and needs a bigger margin. If it moves by three, you have a plan that survives contact with reality.
Two risks the arithmetic cannot show you. Sequence risk means a bad market in your first few retirement years does lasting damage even if long-run averages are fine, which is covered in the sequence-of-returns guide. Account access means retiring before 59½ requires a bridge, since most US retirement money is locked until then; the Roth conversion ladder and the rule of 55 are the usual routes.
What an achievable early retirement usually looks like
The version that shows up in real life is rarely a clean stop at 45. More often it is a staged retreat: full-time work until the Coast FIRE number is banked, then a deliberate downshift to something lower-paid and lower-stress, then part-time work that covers part of spending while the portfolio finishes the job. Each step is optional and reversible, which is precisely why it works: nobody has to bet their entire future on a single date computed a decade in advance.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as "retiring early"?
Anything before your country's normal pension age, most FIRE folks aim for their 40s or 50s. The math is the same at any age; only the safe withdrawal rate should get slightly more conservative the longer your retirement will last.
What return should I assume?
7% nominal (about 4–5% real) is a common conservative assumption for a diversified stock portfolio. Test 6% and 8% to see your best and worst cases, the crossing age is sensitive to it.
What about pensions and Social Security?
They arrive later and reduce how much your portfolio must cover from that point on. A simple approach: subtract expected pension income from your annual spending for the years after it starts, or treat it as a safety margin.