Financial independence

The last card of /projections answers a different question from the rest of the page: not where your wealth goes, but how much of it would be enough to live on. It is the FIRE idea, living off what your wealth pays and stopping work early, applied to your own figures.

Four tiles

Tile	What it is
Passive income	What your net worth could pay a year at a 4 % withdrawal rate, and the same figure per month.
FIRE number	The capital to reach: your annual expenses divided by that same 4 %, which is 25× a year of spending.
Progress	Your net worth over that number, capped at 100 %.
Independence in	The years it takes to get there, compounding your net worth at the rate set at the top of the page and adding your annual savings.

A progress bar under them repeats the third tile.

Where the expenses come from

From your current accounts, over the last twelve months, read the same way the Budget screen reads them. Nothing here is typed by hand.

The card is absent until it has an expense to work from

With no spending recorded on a current account over the last twelve months, there is no annual expense to invert, so the card is not drawn at all: no heading, no empty state. If /projections ends at the ladder for you, that is why.

A short history reads as a cheap year, and a cheap year shrinks the FIRE number and flatters the progress. Three months of imported statements will give you a target roughly a quarter of the right one.

What it counts, and what that costs

The passive income applies the withdrawal rate to your whole net worth, main home included. The part you could actually draw on is smaller: a house pays no income, and selling it to live on is a different plan from the one this tile describes. Read the figure as a ceiling.

Independence in searches sixty years ahead and gives up past that: a horizon longer than a working life is not an answer, and a dash there means the rate and the savings do not get you to the number from here. Raise the growth rate, or look at what the savings line would have to be.

Going further

Go further at the foot of the card opens the Monte Carlo simulator, which is the answer to this card’s weakness: everything above compounds one average rate, and markets do not deliver an average every year.