Skip to content
The FIRE Exit
Exit scenarios · Invented on purpose: the person is fiction, the arithmetic is not.

Sofia, 47: Lisbon

Eighteen months out, fully funded, quietly lost.

She made it out. Why do the days feel soft?

Sofia exited eighteen months ago with €1.1 million and a €2,800-a-month life she genuinely likes. The maths holds. What's stopped holding is the shape of her weeks: the days have gone soft, and she's started wondering if she made a mistake.

Spends
2,800/mo
Invested
€1.1M
Saves
The number (×30)
€1,008,000

Already past the number

The odds their pot dies first

≈0%

run at their exit point, against real market history and mortality tables

My verdict

Sofia didn't make a mistake; she finished the half of the project everyone talks about and walked into the half nobody warned her about. Freedom shows up empty-handed: there's no mission in the box.

Her fix isn't financial and no calculator carries it: a list of things to try, run like experiments, graded honestly, most of them allowed to fail. The pot bought her the blank page. Now she gets to write on it, and that's not a crisis, that's the point.

Next exit: Marta, 34: Berlin

Everyone here runs at a deliberately modest 5% real return (after inflation) and a ×30 number. The calculators default to showing you more of the range; drag the sliders yourself. The people are invented, the arithmetic is real, and none of it is advice.

Bring me a challenge.

The Exit Audit, then ninety minutes: a straight verdict, real alternatives with their pros and cons, and your first move. If you want someone to nod along, I’m the wrong person to pay.