Thinking tools, not truth.
Ten tools I built to think about freedom the way I actually think about it — price the life, find the exit, weigh what each euro really costs. Plus the three I reach for when you outgrow mine. Use them to think, not to decide. None of it is advice.
Built for each step of the exit.
Price the life, see the exit, and which kind of exit it is.
Price the Life
The right first question isn’t “how much?” — it’s “what life do I want, and what does it cost?” Build your number from the bottom up.
Your number
The Exit Calculator
Years to your number, plotted — with the coast point where you can stop adding, and the one-more-year trap on the far side.
Years to exit, and the coast point
What Kind of FIRE?
Coast, barista, lean, full, fat — the five flavours of the exit, and your own number and date for each.
Number and date, five flavours
What each euro, each fee, each bad decade, each border — and each year you get — does to the plan.
The Freedom Price Tag
What any purchase really costs — not in money, but in the pot it needs and the working time that pot takes to build.
The true cost, in your time
The Fee Drag
What fund fees and dividend tax quietly cost you over decades — the European accumulating-vs-distributing question, in euros.
What the fee eats, in euros
The First Bad Decade
Two identical futures in a different order: why the first ten years, not the average, decide whether the money lasts.
Same average, different order
The Three Endings
Alive and funded, alive and broke, or dead — the honest odds of each, at every age from here to 105.
The odds: funded, broke or gone, by age
Where You Live
Taxed when you sell, or taxed just for existing? Over a decades-long exit the difference is enormous. See the shape of it.
Sell-tax vs own-tax, shaped
The Geoarbitrage Map
The same life costs wildly different amounts by country. See how much further — or less far — your money would go.
Your life, priced by country
The heavy machinery.
Mine keep it simple on purpose — and The Three Endings now runs the bad-luck odds in-house. When you outgrow even that, the deep end: historical backtests, withdrawal strategies, Monte Carlo. These are the three I actually use. Each does something mine deliberately don’t.
FI Calcficalc.app ↗
More detailed simulations: historical backtesting and different withdrawal strategies.
Does what mine don’t: How your plan would have survived real history, not a steady average.
cFIREsimcfiresim.com ↗
The classic historical simulator. Stress-tests stock, bond and cash mixes and withdrawal rates against history.
Does what mine don’t: Sequence-of-returns risk — the order returns arrive in, which mine ignores.
Portfolio Visualizerportfoliovisualizer.com ↗
The advanced end: portfolio backtesting, asset allocation and Monte Carlo runs.
Does what mine don’t: Thousands of randomised futures, and how a specific mix behaves.
Nothing here is financial or investment advice — it’s arithmetic and education. Every tool runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere or saved. Decisions about your money are yours, ideally with a licensed adviser. I’m happily not one.
The maths is the short half.
A calculator can tell you when. It can’t tell you what for — or what you’d actually do tomorrow if the number landed tonight. That’s the half I work on with people. Not your portfolio: your plan.