Early retirement isn't about earning more. It's about the gap between what you earn and what you spend, and letting compoundingCompounding: when your investment returns start earning returns of their own. Over decades it becomes the largest part of your wealth. do the rest. This is FIREFIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early. You're financially independent once your investments can cover your living costs indefinitely., made visual. Free, no sign-up.
Everything below updates from these numbers and is shown in today's money (real, inflation-adjusted). Change anything, anytime.
Financial independence has a price tag: the pot that can fund your spending forever. The classic shortcut is the 4% ruleThe 4% rule: research (the Trinity Study) suggested you can withdraw about 4% of your portfolio in year one, then adjust for inflation, and very rarely run out over 30 years. 4% = save 25× your annual spending.: save 25× your yearly spending and you can draw it down indefinitely. Pick a more cautious withdrawal rateSafe withdrawal rate (SWR): the % of your pot you take each year. Lower is safer but needs a bigger pot: 4% → 25×, 3.33% → 30×, 3% → 33×. and the multiple climbs.
"Retire early" means different things. Some cut spending to the bone to get out fast; some keep a little income flowing; some just want to stop adding to the pot and let it ripen. Pick a path and see how the target (and the timeline) shift.
Retire on a deliberately frugal budget. Lower spending means a smaller pot and a much earlier exit, at the cost of a tighter lifestyle.
Two levers move your date more than anything else: saving more, and needing less. Drag them and watch the years react in real time, then see what a single purchase really costs you.
Each extra year you keep saving doesn't just add one year of deposits: it adds a year of growth on everything, and trims the years still ahead.
This is your plan: stop the moment you hit your number.
Spending isn't priced in money. It's priced in time. See what a purchase adds to your working life.
The danger isn't average returns. It's bad returns earlySequence-of-returns risk: a crash in your first retirement years, while you're withdrawing, can permanently sink a portfolio even if the long-run average is fine. The same average in a different order can be perfectly safe.. We run your retirement through hundreds of possible market paths and count how many survive to age 95.
If your pot falls below 85% of its start, you trim spending by this much until it recovers.
Starts from your FIRE number & retirement age, draws your spending each year to age 95.
Press run to simulate. Returns are illustrative (stocks ≈ 7% real / 18% vol, bonds ≈ 2% / 6%); the historical engine samples representative real-return sequences. Teaching tool only.
The model behind the Himma health check: cash flow, safety net, debt, future and protection, each with a hands-on widget so you can feel where you stand before you measure it.
Play with a live order book and market maker. Learn market, limit and stop orders, the bid-ask spread, liquidity, and the full NYSE trading day, step by step.
Guess where your money lands, then watch the curve build. See compound interest, the Rule of 72, the cost of waiting, and how fees and inflation quietly eat your returns, step by step.
A hands-on FIRE calculator and guide. See how your savings rate, the 4% rule and compounding set your retirement date, then stress-test it with Coast/Barista FIRE and a Monte Carlo simulation.