Plan your Financial Independence & early retirement. Find your FIRE number from your expenses, age and inflation — instantly, privately, in your browser.
The calculator above turns your monthly expenses, current age, retirement age and expected inflation rate into four numbers: your current annual expenses, your inflation-adjusted annual expenses at retirement, your FIRE Target, and your FAT FIRE Target.
The FIRE Target assumes a 4% safe withdrawal rate, so it equals 25 times your projected annual expenses. The FAT FIRE Target is more conservative, assuming a 2% withdrawal rate, or 50 times expenses, for investors who want a larger safety margin. Comparing both side by side helps you plan for a leaner or a more comfortable retirement.
Why is my FAT FIRE Target exactly double my FIRE Target?
Because it assumes half the withdrawal rate, 2% instead of 4%, so the required corpus is always double for the same expenses.
Is this financial advice?
No, this tool gives an informational estimate only. For the full concept behind FIRE, safe withdrawal rates and how to think about your target number, see our FIRE Number & Retirement Corpus guide.
Financial independence, retire early is a planning framework built on one arithmetic idea: once a portfolio is large enough that a modest annual withdrawal covers your living costs, paid work becomes optional rather than mandatory. The headline figure people quote, the FIRE number, is simply annual expenses multiplied by 25. That multiplier is the reciprocal of 4%, so the two ideas are the same statement written two ways.
Note what the definition uses: annual expenses, not income. This trips up newcomers constantly. Two people earning identical salaries can have FIRE numbers that differ by a factor of three, because the target is set by what you spend, not what you make. It also means reducing recurring costs moves the finish line towards you and increases savings at the same time, which is why the framework pays so much attention to spending.
Annual expenses of ₹12,00,000 give a FIRE number of ₹3,00,00,000. If a household currently has ₹80,00,000 invested and adds ₹4,00,000 a year, the time to reach the target depends heavily on the assumed return, which is precisely why the assumption deserves more scrutiny than the target.
The 4% figure originates from US research in the 1990s, most famously the Trinity study, which tested historical portfolios of US stocks and bonds against fixed inflation-adjusted withdrawals over 30-year retirements. A 4% initial withdrawal, increased annually with inflation, survived the large majority of historical 30-year windows. That is the whole claim, and it is narrower than the way the number gets repeated.
Several of its assumptions do not transfer cleanly:
None of this makes the rule useless. It makes it a starting point for a conversation rather than a constant of nature. Many practitioners now treat something in the 3% to 3.5% range as the conservative end for very long horizons, and treat flexibility in spending as a first-class variable rather than an afterthought.
This is the single most underrated concept in the whole framework. Two portfolios can experience exactly the same set of annual returns and end up in completely different places purely because of the order in which those returns arrived. The reason is withdrawals. If a severe decline hits in the first few years of retirement, every withdrawal is selling units at depressed prices, permanently removing capital that would otherwise have participated in the recovery. The identical decline occurring fifteen years later, after the portfolio has grown, is survivable.
This is why a single average return assumption, which is what almost every FIRE calculator including this one uses, is a simplification. It shows you the smooth path. The real question is whether the plan tolerates a rough one, and the usual answers are holding a cash or short-duration buffer covering the first few years, keeping some spending genuinely discretionary, or retaining the ability to earn part-time income early on.
| Variant | What it means |
|---|---|
| Lean FIRE | A deliberately minimal expense base, so a smaller portfolio suffices |
| Fat FIRE | A comfortable or generous expense base, requiring a much larger portfolio |
| Coast FIRE | Enough invested that compounding alone reaches the target by traditional retirement age, so no further contributions are needed and current earnings only need to cover living costs |
| Barista FIRE | Partial independence, where a smaller portfolio is combined with modest ongoing income |
Coast FIRE is the most practically interesting of the four because it reframes the goal. Instead of asking when you can stop working entirely, it asks when you can stop saving, which for many people arrives a decade or more earlier and changes career choices immediately.
Being clear about the gaps is more useful than false precision. This tool uses a constant assumed return and a constant inflation rate, which no real market provides. It does not model taxes on withdrawals, which vary by instrument and holding period. It does not model healthcare costs, which typically rise faster than general inflation and represent the largest single uncertainty in a long retirement. It does not account for a paid-off home versus rent, for family obligations, or for any pension, annuity or property income you may have. And it cannot account for the largest variable of all, which is how your spending actually changes once your time is your own.
Your expenses, savings rate and portfolio size describe your financial life in more detail than most documents you own. None of it needs to leave your device to run a compounding formula, and on this page none of it does. Every projection is calculated in your browser using JavaScript loaded with the page. No figure is uploaded, stored between sessions, or sent to an analytics service. You can verify this by watching your browser's network tab stay quiet while you adjust the inputs, or simply by going offline and continuing to use the calculator.
The common shorthand is annual expenses multiplied by 25, which is the same as assuming a 4% annual withdrawal rate. Note that it is based on what you spend each year, not what you earn, so two people on the same salary can have very different targets.
It comes from US research in the 1990s, most notably the Trinity study, which tested historical US stock and bond portfolios against inflation-adjusted withdrawals over 30-year retirements. A 4% initial withdrawal survived most historical 30-year windows. The claim is specific to that horizon, that market history and that inflation environment.
It has less historical support over the 45 to 50 year horizons that early retirement implies, and it excludes taxes and fees. Many practitioners treat 3% to 3.5% as the conservative end for very long horizons and treat the ability to reduce spending in bad years as an important part of the plan.
It is the risk that the order of returns, not just their average, determines the outcome. A severe decline early in retirement forces withdrawals at depressed prices and permanently removes capital that would have shared in the recovery. The same decline much later is far more survivable.
Coast FIRE is the point at which the amount already invested will grow to your target by traditional retirement age without any further contributions. From there, current earnings only need to cover living costs, which for many people arrives years before full financial independence.
No. This page explains how the underlying arithmetic works as general educational information. It is not investment, tax or retirement advice and not a recommendation of any strategy or withdrawal rate. Projections using a constant assumed return are illustrations rather than forecasts.
No. Every projection runs in your browser on your own device. Nothing you enter is transmitted to a server, saved between visits, or attached to analytics, and the calculator keeps working with your network disconnected.