How close are you
to done?

Maybe. If your inputs are honest and returns cooperate. This calculator projects what your money will do if you keep doing what you're doing — it doesn't guarantee it. The bigger question usually isn't whether you can retire at 55. It's whether you actually want to.

Because expenses compound backwards. To fund $60k/yr in retirement forever, you need roughly 25× that — about $1.5M. Push it to $80k/yr and you need $2M. That extra $20k of spending costs you half a million in corpus. This is the 4% rule at work: nudge the spending, big lump moves.

Employer super — the Superannuation Guarantee, currently 12% — is automatic. Your employer pays it on top of your salary. Salary sacrifice is optional. You tell your employer to send extra pre-tax money into super instead of paying it as salary.

Both get taxed at 15% going in. Both count toward the $32,500 concessional cap. Salary sacrifice is a tax play — 15% super tax instead of your marginal rate (32-45%) — which is why high earners do it. If you don't need the cash right now and you're comfortably under the cap, it's usually worth it.

It's close to the ASFA “modest” single lifestyle. It covers essentials — food, utilities, rates, a modest holiday — but not much room for extras. ASFA's “comfortable” single benchmark is around $52k/yr. Real answer depends on: do you own your home? Do you have health costs? Does a partner also earn? The slider is there so you can be honest with yourself.

Right now this calculator assumes you contribute consistently until retirement. A break — parental leave, sabbatical, redundancy — will delay your freedom age. Rough rule: each year off delays freedom by around 1.3 years, because you lose both the contributions and the compounding on them. Proper career break modelling is on the roadmap.

Then your freedom age moves later. 7.5% nominal is a long-run assumption for a diversified portfolio. Historical Australian averages sit around here, but rolling 10-year windows have ranged from 3% to 12%. Quick stress test: mentally drop the return to 6% and add roughly 3 years to whatever this calculator shows.

Because two people is genuinely a different calculation — different ages, different super balances, one might retire earlier, kids somewhere in the middle. We're building Family Mode as a separate flow so it works properly, not as a bolt-on. For now, either run this once for each of you, or run it treating your combined household as one person and combining the numbers.

There's a Retire Abroad module further up. Cost of living in Portugal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia can be a fraction of Melbourne or Sydney — which means your corpus stretches further and your freedom age moves earlier. Full expat planning (tax residence, super access from overseas, health cover) is beyond scope here — this is the “what if my expenses were X instead” version.

Your super fund's calculator shows one pool: your super. It usually assumes you retire at 65 or 67. This one shows both pools — super and outside investments — and models the bridge between your target retirement age and 60. If you're planning to retire before 60, your fund's calculator can't tell you if it's possible. This one can.

The freedom number here assumes you never work again from your target age until 90. If you're happy to keep earning something — part-time consulting, teaching, a small business — you need less. FIRE isn't binary. “Coast FIRE” (enough that you never have to save again) and “barista FIRE” (small part-time income covers the gap) both happen well before “full FIRE.” This calculator shows full FIRE. Anything else is easier.