When can I stop working? 🔥

The target holds still because everything is inflation-adjusted. In the dollars of the day you’d actually need — by then.

Lower draw, bigger target, safer retirement — pick your paranoia level.

Years to the target across nominal returns, your inflation held constant. A flat line at 60 means “not inside 60 years”.

• Everything is in today’s dollars. The nominal return you enter is converted to a real return — (1 + return) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1, not a lazy subtraction — and growth is compounded at that. It means the target never moves and every figure on this page is money you can feel the size of.
• Your contributions track inflation. The monthly amount is held constant in real terms, which in cash terms means it creeps up with inflation the way a salary-linked habit actually does. If your savings won’t grow with your pay, the timeline stretches.
• The 4% rule is an observation, not a law. It comes from backtesting US retirements: a portfolio of shares and bonds survived 30 years in almost every historical window when the draw started at 4% and rose with inflation. It has failure modes — long retirements, bad early years (sequence-of-returns risk), and fees all eat into it. The table above lets you pick a more or less nervous number.
• Coast FIRE is the balance where you could stop adding money entirely and compounding alone would finish the job by 60. Past that point, work is funding your lifestyle, not your retirement.
• Tax isn’t modelled. Dividends and realised gains along the way are taxed at your rate; inside super in pension phase they’re taxed at nothing after 60. Both effects push in opposite directions and depend heavily on your structure — treat the return input as your after-tax expectation.
• Super is the missing wing. For most Australians the super guarantee is quietly building a second FIRE fund that unlocks at 60. If your number lands near that age, you likely need far less outside super than this page implies.
• Returns are smooth here and lumpy in reality. A straight compounding line at 8.8% hides drawdowns of 30–50% that will happen along the way. The destination maths holds; the ride will not look like the chart.
• Also not modelled: pay rises, career breaks, kids, the age pension, HECS, or the possibility that you like your job.

General information only — not financial advice, and I’m not a financial adviser. Your numbers stay in your browser.