When can I retire? A FIRE simulator on 152 years of market history

Would your plan have survived 1929, 1966 or 1973?

This simulator replays your plan through every stretch of US market history since 1871, or resamples that history into thousands of new paths, and finds the smallest change that gets the plan to 90%. Everything is in today's dollars: returns are after inflation, and spending, savings and pension hold their purchasing power.

Your plan01

Current age

Retirement agelast year of saving

Plan until age

Invested savings ($)

Saved each year until retirement ($)

Spending in retirement02

Target spending a year ($)today's dollars, includes any pension

Spending rule

Withdraw each year (% of portfolio)

Floor (% of target)spending never drops below

Ceiling (% of target)

Pension or Social Security ($ a year)

Pension starts at age

Portfolio03

StocksS&P Composite; the rest in 10-year Treasuries, rebalanced yearly75%

Glide path: move to a different mix by retirement

Block length (years)history is resampled in runs this long10

Stock real return (mean)history:

Stock volatilityhistory:

Normal drawsbell-curve years Block bootstrapresampled history Historicalevery start year

...

Running the default plan.

Every retirement year in the record

lasted to the plan-until age ran out not finished: data ends 2022

Portfolio by age, today's dollars

Hover the chart, or focus it and use the arrow keys, to read each age.

10th to 90th percentile 25th to 75th median zero

What gets this plan there?

Smallest single change on each lever

Target

Each lever moves alone; the others stay as you set them. Results use the engine selected above.

Where the numbers come from

Returns are built from Robert Shiller's monthly data: S&P Composite prices and dividends, the CPI and the 10-year Treasury yield, January to January. His file currently runs to September 2023, so the last full year here is 2022 and the record covers 152 years from 1871. Bond returns are a standard approximation from the yield. The write-up has the method, a check against Damodaran's NYU Stern series and a check against the Trinity study.

What it leaves out

This is US history only, one of the best-performing markets of the period, so it is not a forecast. There are no taxes, fees, one-off costs or changes in spending with age, and the historical mode has only about 90 overlapping 63-year windows for the default plan. It is an educational tool and does not give financial advice.