FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. This free calculator estimates your FIRE number, your savings rate, and how many years it will take to reach financial independence — all in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. Enter your income, annual spending, current savings, and expected return, and adjust the sliders (or type exact figures) to see how each choice changes your timeline. Every calculation runs locally in your browser; nothing is sent to a server.
Your FIRE number is the amount you need invested so that investment returns can cover your living expenses indefinitely. It is calculated as 25 times your annual spending, which is the inverse of the 4% safe withdrawal rate. If you spend $50,000 a year, your FIRE number is $1,250,000. Lowering your spending is uniquely powerful because it both shrinks this target and increases how much you can invest each year.
The share of your income you save matters more than your absolute income. At a 10% savings rate it can take 40+ years to reach FIRE; at a 50% savings rate around 17 years; at 75% as few as 7. This calculator shows the effect instantly as you adjust your numbers — including for couples combining two incomes, where a single shared spending figure and combined savings make the timeline dramatically shorter.
Two useful variations you can model here. Coast FIRE: set your extra contributions near zero and see whether compounding alone carries your current savings to the target by a given age — if it does, you've already "coasted." Conservative FIRE: early retirees planning 40–50 year horizons often use a 3.5% withdrawal rate instead of 4%, which means targeting roughly 28.6× annual spending rather than 25× — raise your spending input slightly to approximate it.
What are Lean, Fat, Barista, and Coast FIRE? Lean FIRE means retiring on a minimal budget; Fat FIRE on a generous one; Barista FIRE means partial independence topped up by part-time work; Coast FIRE means saving enough early that compounding alone reaches your target. Read more in our guide, What Is FIRE?
Is the 4% rule safe for early retirement? For very long retirements of 40–50 years, many people use a more conservative 3.5% rate (about 28.6× spending). See The 4% Rule Explained.
This tool is Step 6 of our master guide — The DIY Financial Plan: From First Dollar to Financial Independence.
Explore our other tools — the Retirement Calculator, Mortgage Calculator, and Portfolio Stress-Tester. WealthDeck provides educational tools only, not financial advice — see our Terms & Disclaimer.