Most retirement calculators ask for your savings rate and spit out a number. They skip the part that matters most for early retirees: taxes on every dollar you withdraw. YourFIREPath was built to fix that.
This site is free, runs entirely in your browser (no data ever leaves your device), and is built for people serious about financial independence and early retirement.
I'm an electrical engineer, and I first found FIRE right after I graduated and landed my first real job. The thing that hooked me wasn't a spreadsheet — it was reading Mr. Money Mustache and seeing that the math actually worked, that someone had done it and come out the other side with a genuinely good life. What got me specifically was that he and his wife reached financial independence and then had kids. That combination stuck with me: being FIRE'd, or close to it, by the time I wanted to start a family — so that staying home was a choice I could actually make, not something I had to hope for.
I took the early steps seriously from the start. When I graduated I lived with my parents for just over a year, paid off my student loans, and saved as aggressively as I could before moving out. When I finally did, I bought a three-bedroom townhouse unit in a fourplex and rented out both spare rooms to roommates. My mortgage was around $2,000 a month; my roommates covered about $1,000 of it and split utilities with me. It wasn't glamorous but it worked. House hacking before I knew it had a name.
Eventually I moved in with my boyfriend and turned the townhouse into a rental. My mortgage dropped to about $1,590 once my property taxes came in lower than initially estimated and I was able to drop PMI. The unit rents for $1,800 now — after an 8% property management fee I clear roughly $1,650 a month, which just about covers the mortgage. I essentially break even on cash flow, the mortgage interest gets written off my taxable income, and the equity keeps building in the background.
Running my own numbers through the calculator I built here, I'm about 41% of the way to my full FIRE number. I'm roughly 4 years from Coast FIRE and 7 years from FIRE — those estimates include real tax math, which is why I built this in the first place. Every calculator I tried gave me a number without accounting for what taxes would actually cost me on every withdrawal dollar. As an engineer, that gap bothered me enough to fix it.
I stepped away from FIRE for a while and came back recently — honestly because of AI. The tech industry has had a rough few years with layoffs, and watching how fast things are moving makes the question of job security feel more urgent than it used to. I don't know exactly when AI changes my field in ways that are hard to predict, but I'd rather be financially prepared than not. That urgency is what pulled me back to the numbers and eventually to building this site.
I'm not a financial advisor. I'm an engineer who ran the numbers obsessively for my own life and wanted a tool that actually did it right. Everything here is based on published research, IRS rules, and the same math I use for my own planning. I hope it helps you the way building it helped me.
When I moved back in with my parents after graduating, I made a decision to spend as close to nothing on wants as I possibly could. COVID hit right around the same time, and I suddenly needed a home office setup. I didn't have a desk or a chair. So I pulled my futon up to a TV stand and worked like that for a while. Eventually I upgraded to a $20 beer pong table from Walmart and a dining room chair, which felt like a genuine improvement at the time.
When I finally moved into my own place I got most of my furniture for free or from Ikea and Wayfair. It was functional, it worked, and I didn't think much about it. A friend came over once and asked me why I had nothing on my walls. I hadn't even noticed. I was so focused on only buying things I actually needed that decoration had never crossed my mind.
The coffee situation was maybe the most committed I got. I used to stir ground coffee directly into water, let the grounds settle to the bottom, and drink it that way. Eventually I got a French press — a $15 one from Walmart. The instructions say to use fine-ground coffee but regular grounds work fine in a cheap press, I can confirm.
I don't live like that anymore, but my fixed expenses are still genuinely low. I still drive the car I had in college. My husband and I live in a one-bedroom apartment and our total for rent, parking, and internet is around $1,250 a month. It's not deprivation — it's just that the lifestyle upgrades we skipped early on never felt necessary enough to add back in. The freedom the savings bought feels worth a lot more than the things we didn't buy.
I say all of this not to brag about how frugal I was, but because I think it matters that the person behind a FIRE calculator has actually tried to live the thing. I've run these numbers for my own life. I've made the tradeoffs. The math on this site is the same math I use.
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The core idea: save and invest enough that your portfolio generates more income than you spend - permanently. At that point, work becomes optional.
The math is built on the 4% rule: research shows a portfolio of stocks and bonds can sustain a 4% annual withdrawal indefinitely. That means your "FIRE number" is 25× your annual spending. Hit that number, and you're financially free.
Your savings rate is the percentage of your income you invest each month. It's the single most powerful variable in your FIRE timeline - more than your investment returns, more than your income. Here's why: a higher savings rate means you're accumulating wealth faster and proving you can live on less, which means your FIRE number is smaller.
The table below assumes you're starting from $0 and earning 7% annual returns. The difference between a 20% and 50% savings rate is roughly 20 years of your life.
| Savings Rate | Years to FIRE | Retire Age (start 30) |
|---|---|---|
| 10% | 43 | 73 |
| 20% | 37 | 67 |
| 30% | 28 | 58 |
| 40% | 22 | 52 |
| 50% | 17 | 47 |
| 60% | 12.5 | 42.5 |
| 70% | 8.5 | 38.5 |
Use the Savings Rate Calculator (under Tools in the nav) to calculate yours instantly. Most Americans save 5–10%. Most FIRE seekers target 40–60%.
Once you retire, you stop adding to your portfolio and start drawing from it. The withdrawal rate is the percentage of your portfolio you spend each year. If you have $1,000,000 and spend $40,000, your withdrawal rate is 4%.
The famous 4% rule (from the 1994 Bengen study and 1998 Trinity Study) found that a 4% withdrawal rate has survived every historical 30-year period in US market history - including the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, and the dot-com crash. The math works because your portfolio keeps growing even while you withdraw: in good years it grows faster than you spend, building a buffer for bad years.
Drawdown refers to the year-by-year process of spending down your accounts in retirement. The order matters enormously for taxes. The calculator's default strategy - spend taxable accounts first, then fill low tax brackets with Traditional withdrawals, then Roth last - is designed to minimize the total taxes you pay over your entire retirement.
Most FIRE seekers want to retire in their 40s or early 50s - well before the IRS allows penalty-free access to retirement accounts at age 59½. Withdraw from a Traditional 401(k) before then and you'll owe a 10% penalty on top of ordinary income tax.
The "bridge period" is the gap between when you retire and when you turn 59½. During this window, your spending comes from sources that aren't penalized:
Once you hit 59½, the floodgates open: Traditional 401(k) and IRA withdrawals are fair game. At 73, the IRS requires you to start taking Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) - mandatory yearly withdrawals calculated as a percentage of your account balance. The calculator models all of this in the year-by-year plan.
The calculator is built in four steps, each adding more accuracy. You can stop after Step 1 for a quick answer, or go deeper for a full retirement plan.
The calculator uses the following data and assumptions. These are updated annually where the IRS publishes new figures.