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FIRE calculator

Work out your Full, Coast, and Pension FIRE numbers, with European taxes baked in and a safe withdrawal rate you control.

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The short version: save aggressively, invest boringly, and at some point your portfolio throws off enough to cover your spending without needing a salary. The famous "4% rule" — actually 3.5% on this calculator, because we're in Europe and the math is less forgiving — is the rough threshold where that becomes true for a 30+ year retirement.

There's no single FIRE number. Depending on how you frame it, you might care about:

  • Full FIRE — enough to live off your portfolio forever, no salary ever needed again. Your annual expenses divided by your Safe Withdrawal Rate.
  • Coast FIRE — you've saved enough that, even if you stop contributing today, the portfolio grows on its own to Full FIRE by a target age. You still have to pay the bills from salary in the meantime, but you can stop optimising for savings.
  • Pension FIRE — Full FIRE adjusted down by the present value of your state pension. European state pensions aren't nothing. If you know roughly what you'll get at 67, you only need to bridge the gap between FIRE age and pension age with your own portfolio.
  • Lean / Regular / Chubby / Fat FIRE — variants of Full FIRE based on lifestyle. Not separate formulas, just different values in the "monthly expenses" field below. If you want concrete numbers for what each tier actually buys in Italy, for a single person and for a family of four, read FIRE lifestyles: what does each tier actually look like?

Play with the inputs. If you want to see the raw compounding math without the FIRE framing, the compound interest calculator is the gentler version of this same machinery.

What you spend

€
%

A safety buffer on top of today's spending. Early retirees tend to spend more than expected on travel, hobbies and home repairs — 15% is a reasonable default.

What you have

€
€
%

How much you increase your contribution each year. 2% is reasonable — it matches small salary raises or a decision to save a bit more each year.

Assumptions

%

Nominal return minus inflation. 5% is a conservative long-run real return for a global equity portfolio; raise it to 7% if you prefer the number used elsewhere on this site.

%

The classic Trinity study used 4%. I default to 3.5% here as a European-friendly adjustment — lower expected returns, higher fees and taxes.

Italy taxes capital gains at ~26.0%. This calculator applies an effective withdrawal drag of 13.0% to the math, on the rough assumption that half of each withdrawal is realised gains. source

Ages

67 (Italy)

€

Rough net amount you expect to get from the state pension once it kicks in, in today's money. Leave 0 to ignore pension in the calculation.

Your numbers

Target annual expenses
€31,724
Full FIRE number
€906,404
Coast FIRE number
€267,664
Pension FIRE number
€906,404
Years to Full FIRE
Not within horizon
Years to Coast FIRE
14 years

How the math works

Everything on this page runs in real terms — today's purchasing power. The default 5% return is the real return I expect from a globally diversified equity portfolio over 20+ years (nominal ~8–10%, minus ~3% inflation). The compound interest tool uses 7% instead because it's not modelling a withdrawal phase — FIRE needs the more conservative figure.

The lifestyle bump exists because early retirement isn't free. Travelling more, picking up new hobbies, finally replacing the old appliances — all of that lands on the budget. 15% is a default, not a law. If you're planning on doing nothing but reading library books in a paid-off flat, set it to 0.

The SWR (Safe Withdrawal Rate) is how much of your portfolio you pull out in year one of retirement; the absolute amount then rises with inflation. The original Trinity study landed on 4% as safe for a 30-year US retirement; European-equity returns have historically been lower and expense ratios / taxes are higher, so 3.5% is the default here. Lower = safer but more saving required; higher = faster to hit but more sequence-of-returns risk.

The tax drag is approximated as half of your country's capital-gains rate, on the assumption that at steady state roughly half of each withdrawal is realised gains and half is return of capital. Italy at 26% gives ~13% effective drag, the UK at 20% gives ~10%, and so on. Every source is linked from the country dropdown so you can verify current rates yourself.

A note on European pensions

Most European countries still have meaningful public pension systems — underfunded in places, yes, but not zero. In Italy the contributory system pays roughly 60–70% of your career-average indexed salary if you work a full career; Romania, Germany, France and the UK all have different formulas that land in a similar ballpark. Pension FIRE is the realistic number for most Europeans: your portfolio only has to carry you from whenever you stop working until the state pension kicks in, plus top up whatever the pension doesn't fully cover.

The calculator takes a crude estimate: punch in a rough monthly pension amount in today's money and it will present-value it against the FIRE number. For a more precise figure, INPS, ANAF, Deutsche Rentenversicherung and equivalents will all generate a projection based on your actual contribution history — use those, then plug the result back in here.

Sources

  • Trinity study (Cooley, Hubbard, Walz 1998) — the original SWR paper. The 4% rule comes from this one.
  • Agenzia delle Entrate (IT), ANAF (RO), BZSt (DE), service-public.fr (FR), HMRC (UK), IRS (US) — capital-gains tax rates used in the country dropdown. Links live on the dropdown itself.
  • Big Ern's Safe Withdrawal Rate series at Early Retirement Now — the definitive deep-dive on why 3.5% is more defensible than 4% for long retirements, and why European retirees should think about it differently.