Guides: FIRE, debt and saving, explained properly
Each guide answers one question with worked numbers, then hands you the calculator that produced them.
42 guides · page 1 of 5
Guyton-Klinger guardrails vs fixed
Guyton-Klinger guardrails take a plan from 61% to 99.9% without adding a penny. The price is a median income 6% lower and a floor the rule does not have.
Rich, broke or dead: the third outcome
Femi's plan runs out of money in 42% of simulations. Put mortality on the same chart and his chance of ever being alive and broke is 10.4%.
Sequence of returns risk, in one bad year
The same 35% fall, pot and spending. Landing in year one of retirement it leaves the money gone at 90; landing in year ten it leaves £444,547 spare at 95.
Backtesting a retirement plan since 1900
One plan, £1,000,000 at 4%, started in every year from 1900 to 2023. Eight of 124 retirements failed, and which ones, and how, is the useful part.
What an 85% success rate actually means
Eighty-five per cent is not an 85% chance of anything. What the gauge counts, when the failures land, and the assumptions that move it most.
Lean FIRE vs Fat FIRE: what spending decides
One saver, three retirement budgets, eleven years between the lean date and the fat one. Where those years come from, and the lean plan's trap.
Barista FIRE: the maths of semi-retirement
Part-time work cuts the pot you need by twenty-five times whatever you earn. That number answers a different question from the one most people are asking.
How to compare withdrawal strategies
Fixed real, percentage of portfolio and guardrail rules compared: what each does to your income in a bad decade and how much variability you can live with.
How to run a subscription audit
Finding every recurring charge, converting monthly prices into annual ones, and deciding what to cancel without giving up things you value.
How to use the savings rate calculator
The one percentage that predicts your timeline better than income, how to calculate it honestly, and what each band actually buys you.