InvestingFIRE

What Is FIRE? Understanding Financial Independence and Early Retirement

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It's a lifestyle movement built around two core ideas:

• Aggressive saving & investing—often 50%+ of income—so your capital grows rapidly.
• Passive-income coverage—when your investment returns exceed your living expenses, you gain freedom from a traditional 9-5.

By reaching your personal FIRE Number—the nest egg needed to cover your inflation-adjusted spending—you unlock the option to step away from a daily paycheck and pursue passion projects, travel, family, or anything else. This calculator helps you simulate your journey, estimate how much you need, and visualize both your accumulation phase and your retirement withdrawals over time.

How This FIRE Calculator Provides Investing Insights

Our interactive tool goes beyond a simple “25x annual spending” rule. It runs a year-by-year simulation of your portfolio, combining:

• Starting Capital—your current invested balance
• Monthly Savings—ongoing contributions to your portfolio
• Expected Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)—compounding returns before inflation
• Annual Inflation Rate—to inflate your target withdrawal each year
• Desired Monthly Allowance—today's-value spending goal
• Retirement Age & Life Expectancy—defines your accumulation horizon and payout period

Key features:

• Real-time calculation—as you tweak any input, your FIRE Number and chart update instantly.
• Interactive chart with area plots for both portfolio balance and inflation-adjusted allowance, plus reference lines showing your retirement date and required FIRE Number.
• Custom simulation—switches from accumulation (adding savings) to retirement (withdrawing allowance), compounding each year based on your growth rate.

With this level of granularity, you can confidently experiment with savings rate, target retirement age, and investment assumptions to discover how small tweaks speed up or delay your path to financial independence.

FIRE & Investing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

FIRE Journey & Investing Resources

Ready to deepen your knowledge and build a bullet-proof plan? Below are some of our favorite blogs, books, tools, and communities for financial independence and smart investing.