The number

Whenever I talk about money and freedom, every question turns out to be the same question in different clothes: fine — but how much?

Wrong first question. The first question is: what life do I actually want, and what does it cost? Price the life. The pot is just that number, multiplied.

For the multiple, I use about thirty. Thirty times your annual spending, invested, is my rough rule of thumb for done.

Spending €30,000 a year? Roughly €900,000. €50,000 a year, €1.5 million. €100,000 a year, €3 million. As a withdrawal rate, that's about 3.33% a year.

The figure you'll read everywhere else is 4% — twenty-five times spending. For a retirement starting at sixty-five, probably fine. For a proper early exit I think it's too aggressive: the money might need to last fifty or sixty years, longer if medicine keeps improving. I want a plan that can plausibly last indefinitely, because I don't want a portfolio that only works if I die on schedule.

And put taxes in the spending line. Taxes are part of your expenses — if selling investments to live creates a bill, the pot has to cover your life and the bill.

So that's the size. What do I hold to get there and stay there? Boring things, on purpose. I want my life to be interesting, not my portfolio.

Broad global equities, low fees, low complexity, and enough cash to stay flexible. The equities are there for the long climb. The cash is there to buy calm — so a bad market can never force me to sell good assets at bad prices.

Bonds? They've never attracted me for an exit this long — but that's a personality question, not a maths one. If a 40% crash would have you selling at the bottom, then 100% equities is the wrong portfolio for you, whatever the spreadsheet says. The best portfolio isn't the one with the best return on paper. It's the one you can actually hold through hell.

Taxes get one more paragraph, because they can move the whole answer. A capital-gains tax charges you when you sell. A wealth tax charges your portfolio just for existing. I left Spain at 23 for the road and never moved back — I like the expat life. No drama in it.

And before you move anywhere for the taxes: check the exit tax first, so that leaving later doesn't hand you a bill bigger than the reason you came. Optimise, yes. But the point is freedom — not becoming a tax nomad against your will.

If you want to run your own numbers, I've built a set of tools for exactly this — price the life, find the exit, weigh what each euro costs — plus the heavier calculators I rate. Fair warning: no calculator is the truth. They're thinking tools. Markets pay the same average in a very different order.

None of this is advice — I'm happily nobody's adviser. It's the sums behind my own exit, with the working shown. And the sums turned out to be the short half. The long half is deciding what the freedom is for.

So start where the maths starts. What does the life you actually want cost?