Early Retirement Calculator

Accumulate current savings + annual savings at the real return to each candidate age, then find the earliest age where the corpus survives drawdown to your life expectancy — full expenses (plus a pre-65 healthcare gap, less any part-time income) until Social Security starts, then expenses minus Social Security.

Feasibility, not just a number

A standard FIRE number — expenses ÷ a safe rate — tells you the target but not whether you’ll reach it, or whether it survives a retirement that could last 50 years. This calculator does both: it grows your savings year by year to find the corpus you’ll have, and separately works out the corpus a long drawdown actually requires, then reports the earliest age the two meet. Because the horizon is so long, the sustainable rate is lower than the classic 4% — which is why early retirees lean toward 3–3.5%.

Worked example — age 35, $300k saved, $50k/year, 7% return, $40k expenses: You could retire as early as ~43; by your target of 50 you’d have a large surplus over the ~$780k needed. Drop the savings rate or raise expenses and that earliest age moves out — the calculator recomputes it.

The bridge and the healthcare gap

Two costs catch early retirees that ordinary retirement planning ignores. The bridge: Social Security (or a pension) usually can’t start until your 60s, so the years between retiring and then must be funded entirely from savings — extra corpus the calculator quantifies. And healthcare: before Medicare at 65, you buy your own cover, often a five-figure annual cost, which the calculator adds to spending only for those pre-65 years. Part-time income — barista FIRE — works the other way, offsetting spending for a stretch and lowering the corpus you need.

Sequence risk and the long horizon

The longer the retirement, the more a bad run of early markets matters — sequence-of-returns risk is the central danger of retiring young. This tool uses a steady real return, so it can’t model that directly; treat a plan that only just works as not yet safe. The conservative withdrawal rate is your buffer. To see the trade-off of saving more now, use the Coast FIRE and Required Contribution calculators; to model the drawdown in detail, see Safe Withdrawal Rate and How Long Will My Money Last.