FIRE Calculator
Financial independence is annual spending divided by a withdrawal rate. Both numbers are yours: Sansara records neither your income nor your expenses, and the familiar 4% figure comes from a 1990s American study, not from arithmetic.
What you enter
- Annual spending — What a year of your life costs, in today’s money.
- Withdrawal rate — The share of the corpus you would draw each year. Not pre-filled — see the FAQ.
- Invested today
- Monthly investment
- Expected annual return — Yours to choose. Sansara does not suggest a rate — the number you pick decides everything below it.
What it tells you
- Your FIRE number
- Progress so far
- Years to reach it
- Still to go
How this is worked out
FIRE number = annual spending ÷ withdrawal rate. The timeline compounds your existing corpus and monthly contributions at your assumed return until it reaches that number, searching up to 40 years.
What it cannot know
- This is arithmetic on the numbers you entered — not a forecast, not a promise, and not a view on any fund or stock.
- Real returns vary year to year and can be negative. A single average rate cannot show that.
- Taxes, exit loads, fund expenses and inflation are not applied unless a field above asks for them.
- If the target is not reached inside 40 years the page says so rather than extending the axis until the answer looks better.
- Spending is held flat in today’s money. Inflation, a mortgage ending, or children’s education all change it.
Questions
Why is 4% not pre-filled?
Because it is a conclusion from the Trinity Study, run on US stocks and bonds over US history, for a 30-year retirement. Applying it to Indian markets and a possibly-longer retirement is a judgement — and pre-filling it would mean Sansara quietly decided when you can stop working. It is the input a reader is least likely to question, because it arrives looking like a constant.
Why can progress go above 100%?
Because someone past their number deserves to see it. A bar that stops at 100 hides how much headroom you actually have.
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Sansara is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. This page performs arithmetic on numbers you enter and does not recommend any security, scheme or course of action.