FIRE Calculator

What it calculates

Enter your current assets, monthly investment, retirement spending, and a return assumption to estimate the age you reach your target and the assets you need at that point. After FIRE, it continues the projection to the plan end age, showing how assets change as you draw on them for spending.

Default assumptions

Unless you change them, the calculator uses a 11% annual nominal return, 2.5% annual inflation, a 4% withdrawal rate, and a plan end age of 100. The 11% return is SPY's annualized total return since inception, rounded. You can change every value in the Plan settings.

Apply Dividend Tax is off by default. Turn it on to include 15.4% dividend tax on dividends.

Reading the 4% rule

The 4% rule is a historical planning reference that starts with withdrawing 4% of the portfolio in the first year of retirement, which is why the target is 25 times annual spending. For $1M, the starting point is $40,000 a year or about $3,333 a month.

Twenty-five times annual spending is only a planning reference; it does not guarantee a retirement date or how long assets will last. Outcomes vary with horizon, asset mix, inflation, taxes, fees, and the sequence of market returns.

Three ways to fund retirement spending

“Withdraw from assets” takes your withdrawal rate out of the portfolio each year, the standard approach. “Live on dividends” keeps the principal and finds when monthly dividends reach your target spending; dividends are assumed to grow 5% a year by default. “Whichever comes first” shows when either test covers your spending first.

Conservative, base and optimistic scenarios

The conservative and optimistic ages are recalculated with the base return lowered or raised by 20%. If the base is 11% a year, conservative uses 8.8% and optimistic 13.2%. A wide gap means your retirement date depends heavily on the return assumption.

Adding pensions and large expenses

Income that starts at a set age, such as a state pension, and large expenses over a period, such as tuition, can be added with an amount and start and end ages. They reduce or increase the yearly withdrawal you need after retirement.

Today’s money versus nominal amounts

Nominal amounts are the figures in that year; today’s money divides them by inflation to show their purchasing power now. At 2.5% inflation, 100 million won in 30 years is worth about ₩47.7M today. Read large far-off figures in today’s money as well.

Data and methodology

If you set the return assumption to Portfolio history, the calculator uses the selected ETF mix's historical returns. Analyzing retirement market risk also checks whether assets last after retirement across many simulated paths. Past performance and simulated paths do not guarantee future returns.

Reading the worst 10%, median and best 10%

When the analysis includes the market after retirement, assets are calculated by age across many paths built from the selected ETF mix’s historical returns. The shaded band runs from the bottom 10% to the top 10%, and the middle line is the median. When planning, check that assets last in the worst 10% before looking at the median.

How to retire earlier

You can change the monthly investment, spending after retirement, the return assumption and the withdrawal rate. The investment scenario comparison shows how many years earlier you reach FIRE by adding 100,000, 300,000 or 500,000 won a month. The withdrawal rate can be set from 2% to 8%. Lowering it to 3.5% raises the target to about 28.6 times annual spending but leaves more room for your assets to last.

Continue to where you could live

The monthly spending from your FIRE result can be carried to the Lifestyle screen to compare it with living costs in cities where data is available.