FIRE Calculator
Drag the sliders and watch your retirement age move. Your FIRE, Coast FIRE, and Barista FIRE numbers, live, in today's dollars.
Every $137 you invest buys about one day of freedom.
Projection assumes steady contributions and returns. Real markets move in jumps; treat this as a map, not a prophecy.
The lever most calculators ignore: earn more
Drag to see what a raise does to your timeline.
Cutting lattes saves hundreds. A new skill raises your income by thousands, every year, and the gap goes straight into your savings rate. High-income tech skills are learnable; that is exactly what CodingPhase teaches, with 90+ courses and guided career paths from beginner to job-ready.
Explore Career PathsWhat is FIRE? Financial Independence, Retire Early
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early: saving and investing aggressively, usually 40% to 70% of income, so that investment returns can cover your living costs decades before traditional retirement age. The movement grew out of the 1992 book Your Money or Your Life and the early-2010s blogosphere, and it runs on one piece of math: once your invested portfolio reaches roughly 25 times your annual spending, work becomes optional. FIRE is not about never working again. It is about removing the obligation to work.
How your FIRE number is calculated
Your FIRE number equals your annual spending divided by your safe withdrawal rate. At the standard 4% withdrawal rate, that simplifies to spending times 25. The 4% rule comes from the Trinity Study, which tested historical US market data and found a 4% initial withdrawal, adjusted for inflation each year, survived nearly every 30-year retirement window since 1926.
| Annual spending | FIRE number (4% rule) | FIRE number (3.5%, safer) |
|---|---|---|
| $30,000 | $750,000 | $857,000 |
| $40,000 | $1,000,000 | $1,143,000 |
| $50,000 | $1,250,000 | $1,429,000 |
| $75,000 | $1,875,000 | $2,143,000 |
| $100,000 | $2,500,000 | $2,857,000 |
Notice that income appears nowhere in the formula. Your FIRE number is set entirely by what you spend. That is why two developers on identical salaries can be twenty years apart in their retirement dates.
Your savings rate decides your retirement date
The percentage of take-home pay you invest is the single biggest lever in FIRE math. Assuming a 5% real return and the 4% rule, starting from zero invested:
| Savings rate | Years until work is optional |
|---|---|
| 10% | ~51 years |
| 25% | ~32 years |
| 40% | ~22 years |
| 50% | ~17 years |
| 65% | ~10.5 years |
| 75% | ~7 years |
A raise you invest shortens that timeline twice: it grows the amount you save and it proves you can live without the extra spending. A raise you absorb into lifestyle does nothing at all.
Coast FIRE: the checkpoint most people should aim for first
Coast FIRE means your current portfolio will compound to your full FIRE number by traditional retirement age with zero additional contributions. The formula: divide your FIRE number by (1 + annual return) raised to the power of years remaining until your target age. Example: a 30-year-old targeting $1.25 million at 65 with 5% real returns needs $1,250,000 ÷ 1.05³⁵, which is about $227,000 invested today. Hit that, and every dollar earned afterward only needs to cover current bills. Coast FIRE is popular with tech workers because a few high-saving years in your twenties can buy total career flexibility for the rest of your life. Use the Coast FIRE mode in the calculator above to see your own checkpoint.
Barista FIRE: part-time work covers the gap
Barista FIRE means your portfolio covers most of your spending and a low-stress part-time job covers the rest. The formula: (annual spending minus part-time income) times 25. Someone spending $50,000 who can earn $20,000 from part-time work needs $750,000 instead of $1.25 million, a 40% smaller target. The name comes from people taking coffee-shop jobs partly for employer health insurance, but for a developer the part-time work is more likely a day a week of freelance code at consulting rates.
Lean FIRE vs Fat FIRE
Lean FIRE and Fat FIRE are the same 25x formula applied to different lifestyles. Lean FIRE covers a slim budget, typically $40,000 a year or under, so the target is around $1 million or less. Fat FIRE funds $100,000+ of annual spending and needs $2.5 million or more. Most tech workers who run the numbers land deliberately in between: comfortable spending, aggressive savings rate, work optional in their forties.
Why tech workers reach FIRE faster than almost anyone
High income early, income that scales with skills instead of hours, and remote work that decouples salary from cost of living: tech careers stack the three strongest FIRE advantages. A developer earning $100,000 and spending $50,000 has a 50% savings rate, which historically means work becomes optional in about 17 years, starting from nothing. The main obstacle is lifestyle inflation, because tech salaries make expensive habits feel affordable. We wrote a full playbook on this: how to retire early with a tech job.
FIRE calculator FAQ
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This calculator is for education, not personalized financial advice. Historical returns do not guarantee future results. For decisions involving real money, talk to a fee-only fiduciary advisor.
Your income is the fastest FIRE lever
Every scenario above gets shorter when the income number grows. That part is learnable: 90+ courses, guided career paths, and an 80,000+ member community.
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