When you can stop working
You are financially independent once your portfolio reaches your annual retirement spending divided by your withdrawal rate — 25 times your spending at the 4% rule — and the age you get there is driven far more by your savings rate than by your investment return.
Worked example: with Your age of 30, this model computes Financially independent at 52. See the full breakdown.
✓ 4 self-test cases · assumptions shown No rates to go out of date · reviewed 2026-08-02
How retirement and fire planner is worked out
Financial independence has one arithmetic definition: a portfolio large enough that a safe withdrawal from it covers your spending. At a 4% withdrawal rate that is 25 times your annual spending. Enter 60,000 of retirement spending and the target is 1,500,000 — before any pension you expect, which the model subtracts at the same rate.
The number that actually moves the date is your savings rate, not your return. Saving 40% of a 100,000 take-home gets you there in 22 years on these assumptions; saving 60% gets you there in 17. A higher savings rate does two things at once — it adds more each year and it lowers the target, because you need less to live on.
Everything here is computed in real terms. The projection grows the portfolio at the real return — the nominal return adjusted for inflation, 3.88% from 7% and 3% — rather than the nominal one, so the target and the portfolio are in the same money. Mixing a nominal return with today’s-money spending is the standard error in retirement projections, and it flatters the answer by years.
Worked example
| Your age | 30 |
|---|---|
| Invested today | 100000 |
| Take-home income / yr | 100000 |
| Spending / yr | 60000 |
| Retirement spending / yr (today's money) | 60000 |
| Nominal return per year (%) | 7 |
| Inflation per year (%) | 3 |
| Safe withdrawal rate (%) | 4 |
| Saved per year ✓ | 40000 |
| Savings rate ✓ | 40 |
| Real return ✓ | 3.8835 |
| The number you need ✓ | 1500000 |
| Coast FI number ✓ | 478293.04 |
| Financially independent at ✓ | 52 |
| Fi Reached ✓ | true |
| Years to get there ✓ | 22 |
| Final Portfolio ✓ | 4157295.48 |
| Income at the end ✓ | 166291.82 |
Every row is computed by the engine from the inputs above. Rows marked ✓ are additionally pinned by a published self-test vector.
Frequently asked questions
How much do I need to retire?
Your annual retirement spending divided by your withdrawal rate. At the 4% rule that is 25 times your spending, so 60,000 a year needs 1,500,000. A state or workplace pension reduces the target by the same arithmetic — a 12,000 pension takes 300,000 off the number.
What is Coast FIRE?
The amount that, left invested and never added to, grows to your FI number by your target retirement age. Reach it and you can stop saving and simply cover your living costs. At 30 with a target of 1,500,000 at 60, the coast number is around 478,000.
Is the 4% rule safe?
It comes from studies of historical 30-year retirements and is a reasonable starting point, not a promise. It is a slider here for exactly that reason — at 3.5% the target rises by about 14%, and you can see what that does to the date rather than being told.
Does the investment return or the savings rate matter more?
The savings rate, by a wide margin, especially early on, because it raises contributions and lowers the target at the same time. Drag the two sliders and compare: a ten-point change in savings rate typically moves the date further than a one-point change in return.
Sources
Projection, not advice. The badge means the engine reproduces this model's own arithmetic through 4 self-test cases. It says nothing about whether the assumptions above will hold — nobody can verify a forecast. What this page offers instead is that every assumption is visible, editable, and traceable to the figure it moves.
Check the arithmetic yourself: how this calculator is verified — the formula behind every derived value, the 4 test cases the engine reproduces, and what the badge does and does not claim. Also available as machine-readable JSON.
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