Three ways this ends.
The question under every withdrawal rate isn’t just “will the pot last?” It’s “will it last as long as I do?” From your age, your pot and your draw: the odds, year by year, that you’re alive and funded, alive and broke, or dead. It’s the chart behind a line I mean literally: I don’t want a portfolio that only works if I die on schedule.
Explain it like I’m five
You stop working and live off the pot. Three stories can follow: the money lasts as long as you do, the money runs out first — or you run out first, with money to spare. This page shows the odds of each, at every age from yours.
New to all of it? This idea is stop 8 of Start from zero: ten short lessons that assume nothing.
The Three Endings
A 3.33% withdrawal rate, ×30 your spend.
EU-27 life table: women outlive men by years, and the odds move with it.
A what-if, not a forecast: your body runs ten or twenty years younger than the calendar says, and the chart follows, to 115 or 125.
The verdict
0.3%
the odds the pot dies before you do
By 70, ‘broke’ is a ≈0% ending; ‘dead’ is a 15% one.
broke ≈0%
dead 15%
broke ≈0%
dead 34%
broke 0.2%
dead 70%
broke ≈0%
dead 98%
The pot outlasting you is the overwhelming ending. The question left isn’t the money — it’s the years.
History as the odds: your mix walks all 152 start years of the long US record (the only century-and-a-half record there is, used as proxy), wrapping so every cohort runs full length; real terms, rebalanced yearly, the draw taken at each year’s start. Death odds: Eurostat’s EU-27 life table (2024), extended past 94 the standard actuarial way. The longer-life setting is a what-if, not a forecast: it runs your body ten or twenty years younger than the calendar says, and moves the horizon to 115 or 125. Money and mortality treated as independent. Education, not advice: nobody’s odds are the average’s.
After Rich, Broke or Dead (Engaging Data): the idea, rebuilt European. Mortality: Eurostat demo_mlifetable, EU-27, 2024, CC BY 4.0. Markets: Robert Shiller’s long-run US series, 1871–2022.
The link carries these exact numbers. Anyone with it can read them, and opening it sends the address to the host.
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These odds assume the pot carries everything, every year. If a pension will eventually help, the pot’s job is smaller: The Pension Bridge prices that version of the number. The Pension Bridge
Common questions
- The odds of going broke are only 3% — so I’m safe?
- Read it carefully. That 3% is the chance your money runs out while you’re still alive, and it’s partly low because you might not live long enough to run out. The biggest slice is often “gone, with money to spare”. It’s reassuring, but half the reassurance is mortality, not your plan. What you’d actually do if the bad years came first is the playbook in Living off it.
- Where do these odds come from?
- The money odds run your plan through every stretch of the long US market record (in today’s money); the life-and-death odds come from official European life tables. It’s history as a guide, not a promise, and death odds are averages, so nobody’s are exactly these.
- What does the “+10 years” longer-life option do?
- It’s a what-if: it runs your body as if people live noticeably longer than today’s tables say, to test whether the money would still last. It’s a stress test, not a prediction that you’ll live to 100.
- Why show “dead” at all? Isn’t that morbid?
- Because a plan that ignores it is lying to you. Running out at 95 but dying at 80 are very different outcomes, and most calculators pretend the second never happens. Seeing all three honestly is the only way to judge whether you’re actually fine.
Nothing here is financial, investment, medical or retirement advice: it’s arithmetic and education. The calculators use the numbers you enter, The Exit Rehearsal compares your own Plan and Reality without interpreting either, and The Spare Key prices the fallback you enter without recommending one. Some tools remember work in the browser, some can place a scenario in the page address, and the Rehearsal and the Spare Key stay in this browser unless you print them, download them, or keep them in your account. Each tool tells you what it keeps and where. Decisions about your money are yours, ideally with a licensed adviser. I’m happily not one.
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.