Your personal AI for understanding and tracking your personal finance.
Your personal AI for understanding and tracking your personal finance.
Enter your numbers — your earliest retirement age, your portfolio at 55, 60, 65 & 70, and the gap to your target appear in seconds. Built on the 4% safe-withdrawal rule and compound-growth math.
Target portfolio
$1.5M
4% rule basis
25× $60K
Earliest year
Age 53
Current shortfall
$1.35M
Projection assumes constant 7% real (inflation-adjusted) annual return + constant $30K/year savings. Target ($1.5M) = 25 × your annual retirement spending, per the 4% rule.
How your portfolio looks at each milestone retirement age — and the annual spending it can support on the 4% rule.
“Sustainable spending” = portfolio × 4%. “vs target” = portfolio − $1.5M (your 25× target). Green rows are scenarios where the projection meets or exceeds your target — you could choose to retire earlier and spend less, or work longer for cushion.
The savings maths above tells you when your portfolio is big enough. Three mechanical gates then decide whether you can actually use the money at that age — and each one moves the realistic date.
1. Penalty-free access to retirement accounts. 401(k) and IRA withdrawals before 59½ normally cost a 10% penalty on top of income tax. Two standard exceptions move the gate earlier: the Rule of 55 lets you tap the 401(k) of the employer you leave in or after the year you turn 55, penalty-free (that plan only, not IRAs or old 401(k)s); and 72(t) SEPP payments allow penalty-free withdrawals at any age, in exchange for locking in substantially equal payments for five years or until 59½, whichever is longer — rigid enough that breaking the schedule claws back every waived penalty. Taxable brokerage money has no age gate at all, which is why early retirees hold some.
2. Social Security's early-claiming cut. The earliest claim is 62, but for anyone born in 1960 or later the full retirement age is 67 — and claiming at 62 permanently reduces the benefit by about 30%. The Social Security calculator shows the check at every claiming age from 62 to 70 and the age at which waiting breaks even. Retiring at 50 also means up to 17 zero-earning years in the 35-year average that sets your benefit, so the statement estimate you see today assumes earnings you will no longer have. Retiring early is fine; counting on a full-sized benefit while doing it is the mistake.
3. Health insurance until Medicare at 65. Leave work at 50 and you self-fund coverage for 15 years — often the single largest line in an early-retirement budget, and the one most calculators skip. We model it separately in the FIRE healthcare bridge calculator. Sources: IRS Topics 558/72(t); SSA retirement age and benefit-reduction schedules.
The calculator uses the standard 4% safe-withdrawal rule from the 1994 Trinity Study: a portfolio supports an inflation-adjusted withdrawal of 4% of its starting value for a 30-year retirement, based on historical US market returns. Multiply your target annual retirement spending by 25 to get your required portfolio at retirement.
Compound growth math projects your portfolio forward: FV = PV × (1 + r)n + PMT × ((1 + r)n − 1) / r — where PV is your current portfolio, PMT is your annual contributions, r is your expected real return, and n is the number of years invested. The earliest retirement age is the smallest n where the projected FV equals or exceeds your required target.
All returns are real (inflation-adjusted), so the dollar figures shown represent today's purchasing power. The 7% default is the long-run real return of a US-stock-heavy diversified portfolio; conservative planning uses 5%, aggressive uses 9%.
Things the math leaves out — Social Security (covers part of retirement spending so reduces required portfolio), taxes on withdrawals (401(k) is taxed as income; Roth is tax-free), and sequence-of-returns risk (the actual order of returns matters, not just the average). For a full multi-scenario projection that includes those, use our retirement planning calculator.
It's a free tool that estimates the earliest age at which you can retire and live off your investment portfolio, using the standard 4% safe-withdrawal rule. Enter your current age, savings, annual contribution, expected return, and target retirement spending — the calculator tells you (a) the earliest year you'd hit a portfolio large enough to fund that spending, and (b) what your portfolio would be at age 55, 60, 65, and 70 under your current plan.
The 4% rule says you can withdraw 4% of your portfolio in year one of retirement (adjusted up for inflation each year after) without running out over a 30-year retirement, based on historical US market returns. It originated in the 1994 Trinity Study. Current research debates whether 3.5%–4% is the safer range given today's higher equity valuations and longer life expectancies — but 4% remains the standard benchmark in most retirement-planning tools. To target a more conservative withdrawal rate, multiply your annual spending by 30 (for 3.33%) or 33 (for 3%) instead of 25.
FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) calculators typically lead with Lean/Regular/Fat FIRE thresholds ($600K, $1.25M, $2.5M+) and use savings-rate-to-years framing pulled from the FIRE community. The Early Retirement Calculator uses mainstream framing — your inputs are your current numbers and target retirement age, not abstract FIRE thresholds. Same underlying math (compound growth + 4% rule), different framing. If you want to dive deeper into FIRE-specific strategies, see our /us/tools/fire-calculator.
The 7% default reflects the long-run historical real return (inflation-adjusted) of a diversified US stock-heavy portfolio over 30+ year periods. Conservative planning uses 5%; aggressive uses 8%-9%. The return assumption matters a lot over long horizons — at 5% real, a $300K portfolio with $20K/year contributions doubles in 13 years; at 7% it doubles in 10; at 9% it doubles in 8. Build in a margin of safety by stress-testing with a return rate 1-2 percentage points below your central estimate.
No — the calculator gives you the portfolio you need to fully self-fund retirement on the 4% rule. Social Security is a separate income stream that reduces your portfolio's required size. A typical Social Security check at full retirement age (67) is around $24,000/year as of 2026; if your target spending is $60,000/year, Social Security covers about 40% of that, meaning your portfolio only needs to cover $36,000/year × 25 = $900,000 (not $1.5M). Most planners model the portfolio independently because Social Security timing decisions are complex and the early retirement years (before 62 or 67) require the portfolio to carry the full load.
The 4% rule operates on the PRE-tax portfolio size — withdrawals from 401(k)/Traditional IRA are taxed as income, Roth withdrawals are tax-free, and taxable account withdrawals trigger capital gains. To approximate after-tax: increase your target spending by your expected effective tax rate in retirement (typically 12-18% for middle-income households after standard deduction). For example, $50,000 of true spending need with a 15% effective tax rate means modeling against $58,800 of gross spending.
Three levers. (1) Save more — every additional $5K/year in contributions cuts roughly 1-2 years off the timeline. (2) Reduce target spending — every $10K/year reduction in target spending cuts your required portfolio by $250K (4% rule). (3) Work longer — each additional year of work means both more contributions AND another year of compound growth on the existing balance. The third lever is the most powerful but also the one most retire-early-curious users want to avoid. Use the scenario table on this page to see the trade-offs concretely.
The calculation is mathematically exact given your inputs — it solves the compound-growth equation directly. The real-world accuracy depends entirely on whether your assumptions hold: actual returns vary year-to-year (the calculator assumes smooth average returns), expenses change with life events, and the 4% rule is a historical benchmark not a guarantee. Use this as a planning anchor, not a precise prediction. Stress-test by re-running with worse assumptions (lower returns, higher spending) to find your margin of safety.
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Get Richify freeBased on the 4% safe-withdrawal rule (Trinity Study, 1994) and compound-growth math. For education only — not financial advice. © 2026 Richify.
