FIRE Progress Tracker

How to use this tracker

Three sections of inputs, one number out: your progress toward FIRE as a percentage, plus your net worth, your FIRE target, and the gap between them. The defaults are placeholder numbers — replace them with your own.

Start with annual expenses and your safe withdrawal rate. The tracker divides expenses by SWR to get your FIRE number — the portfolio size that would let you live on the returns indefinitely. Then plug in your assets and liabilities to see where you stand today.

What counts (and what doesn't)

Only invested assets push you toward FIRE — the money that compounds and pays you to live. Not home equity, unless you actually plan to downsize or sell. Not the value of your car, your watch collection, or your wardrobe. Those are real assets with real value, but they don't generate the income stream that FIRE depends on.

Your mortgage offsets the equity in your home dollar-for-dollar, which is why both show up as inputs. The same logic applies to any other debt — it reduces your net worth because it reduces what you'd actually have if you sold everything today. Debt that carries a low interest rate (some mortgages, some student loans) is still a real liability, but its impact on FIRE math is mostly psychological; the FIRE number itself is the same whether your debt is at 3% or 7%.

A common mistake: counting your home as a major asset. A $400,000 house with a $250,000 mortgage is $150,000 of equity — meaningful, but not $400,000 of "invested wealth." If you're planning to sell and rent in retirement, the equity becomes part of your portfolio. If you're planning to stay and pay off the mortgage, it's a roof, not a retirement account.

How the FIRE number is calculated

The formula is simple:

At a 4% withdrawal rate, the multiplier is 25×. So $40,000 in annual expenses becomes a $1,000,000 FIRE number. $60,000 in expenses becomes $1,500,000. The 4% rule is the most common default — it comes from William Bengen's 1994 study of historical US market returns, which found that a 4% initial withdrawal rate, adjusted annually for inflation, never exhausted a 50/50 stock/bond portfolio over any 30-year window in the historical record.

A more conservative planner might pick 3.5%, which gives a multiplier of about 28.5×. Same $40,000 in expenses becomes a $1,140,000 target. The trade-off: lower SWR means a higher number, but more margin for sequence-of-returns risk (the risk that you retire into a bear market and your first few years of withdrawals permanently damage the portfolio).

Reading your result

The tracker shows your progress as a percentage (current net worth vs. FIRE number), your net worth, your FIRE target, the remaining gap, and an estimated months to FIRE based on your current net worth growing linearly at a 1-year-per-12-of-portfolio rate. That last estimate is rough — it doesn't model compound growth or contributions, it's a back-of-envelope "how long at the current rate" check. The real answer requires a more detailed projection.

What the result doesn't tell you

This tracker assumes your entire annual expense load has to come from portfolio withdrawals. In practice, most retirees layer multiple income sources: Social Security benefits, a pension (if you have one), part-time work, rental income, or a reverse mortgage. Each of those reduces what the portfolio has to cover, which lowers the effective FIRE number.

Taxes matter too. Withdrawals from a traditional 401(k) or traditional IRA are taxed as ordinary income, which means a $50,000 withdrawal might only net you $38,000 after federal and state taxes. Roth accounts don't have this problem, which is one reason many FIRE planners emphasize maxing out Roth contributions early.

Healthcare is the wildcard. Before Medicare eligibility at 65, an early retiree is paying for their own insurance (ACA marketplace or COBRA), which can run $500-$1,500/month for a family. After 65, Medicare covers a lot but not everything — long-term care, dental, vision, and hearing are mostly out of pocket.

Common mistakes when tracking progress

• Counting home equity as invested wealth. It isn't, unless you're planning to sell.
• Ignoring tax-advantaged vs. taxable accounts. $100,000 in a Roth IRA and $100,000 in a brokerage account aren't equivalent for FIRE purposes — one is tax-free to withdraw, the other is taxed.
• Using gross income instead of annual expenses. The FIRE number is driven by what you spend, not what you earn. A high earner who saves 50% of their income might have the same FIRE number as a moderate earner who saves the same dollar amount.
• Updating net worth too often. Quarterly is plenty. Daily checking creates noise anxiety that doesn't help you make better decisions.
• Forgetting about lumpy expenses. Annual expenses for a typical household include things like insurance premiums, property taxes, and travel that don't show up in monthly cash flow. Build them in.

What to do once you hit 100%

Hitting your FIRE number doesn't mean you have to stop working. Most Coast FIRE and FIRE practitioners keep working in some form — they switch to lower-paying jobs they like, take sabbaticals, work part-time, or pursue projects they'd been postponing. The point of hitting the number is that work becomes optional. You no longer need it to pay the bills.

The full Coast FIRE approach is a stepping stone: hit your Coast FIRE number first (a smaller, earlier milestone), and you've bought yourself the right to ease off savings. Hit your full FIRE number, and you've bought yourself the right to stop working entirely if you want to. The compound interest guide explains why the Coast FIRE number is so much smaller than the full number — it gets there on its own.

This tracker is for educational purposes only. FIRE depends on taxes, Social Security, pensions, healthcare, and spending flexibility. Not financial advice. See our Editorial Policy for how we approach this content.