(opens in a new tab)Use the Calculator to Forecast Your Financial Future
You work hard when you choose and take breaks at will.
The Time Freedom Calculator answers this question: if you stop conventional work at a certain age and switch to flexible work, does the money hold up?
You tell it your current age, what you expect to spend, what you've saved, and what you think you can earn flexibly after that. It runs the math out to the end of your plan and shows you whether you make it.
It isn't a budgeting tool, and it isn't a retirement calculator in the traditional sense. It's built around your free age—the year you stop trading all of your time for money.
Enter your numbers, including the age you'd like to be free, to reveal your results. Then adjust until you gain the financial confidence to live this way.
Tutorials
Case studies
Age: 42 years old, Bellingham, Washington
Freetimer Goal: 3 years
Age: 40 years old, Atlanta
Freetimer Goal: 10 years
Age: 35, with full time spouse who is age 40, Colorado Springs Freetimer Goal: Immediate
Age: 25 years old, Chicago
Freetimer Goal: 10 years
Age: 60, high earner and high spender, New York City
Freetimer Goal: 5 years to full retirement
Age: 40, outside Boise, Idaho
Freetimer Goal: 3 years
Frequently Asked Questions
Before you start
No. Everything in the calculator works without one. Put in your numbers, read the chart, read the table, adjust—all of it.
The one thing you can't do without an account is save. If you want your scenarios waiting for you next time, you'll need one. Most people want that eventually, because a lot of the value comes from having scenarios you can put side by side or track over time.
There is no password. That's on purpose.
You enter your email and the system sends a code to that address. Type it in and you're golden. The code is generated uniquely each time, so there's nothing to remember and nothing to reset. If you've never used the calculator before, use the sign in link instead and it will create the account for you.
The code usually arrives within a few seconds. If it doesn't, check your spam folder and request another one.
I only ask for labels and values. That's it.
There are no account numbers in this tool, no institution names, and nothing that identifies you. If you're a registered user I have your email, because that's how you log in, but that’s it.
And if you don't create an account, nothing is stored at all.
No. This is a self-directed planning tool, and every number in it is an approximation—including the defaults I picked.
The challenge in building something like this is to make it not so simple that it's just the 4% rule, and not so detailed that it becomes false precision. Most of the time, we're modeling decades. The point is to see roughly where you stand and find out which numbers actually change the answer, not to predict your balance in the year 2061, to the dollar.
If you want someone to look at your specific circumstances, talk to a professional who can do that.
Setting up your scenario
You enter your free age. The calculator works out the year.
Your free age is the age at which you stop conventional work and start living with time freedom. Almost everything else in the tool keys off it—lifestyle expenses, flexible income, cash river, savings mountain, etc.
I always plan to100 years old.
I know the average person doesn't live to 100. But you don't want to run out of money, so let's make it last as long as possible. Plan too long, and you’ll have some extra money for your heirs. Plan too short and you've got a real problem.
Do the plan together. It's a joint plan—one set of numbers, not two.
Pick the age of the person pursuing time freedom. If both of you are, pick the older one. Then (and importantly) every age in the rest of the plan has to be consistent with that person. Don't switch back and forth between your age and your spouse's.
An example. Say you've entered your spouse's age for calculations, and you're ten years younger than your spouse. If you want the plan to last until you're 100, you'd set the end age to 110. Because your spouse would be 110 when you're 100. Everything is in your spouse's age now.
Stick with one person's age and account for the other person around it.
To avoid double counting.
Before your free age, think of daily life as netting out to a savings amount. Your income (which you don't enter) minus your lifestyle expenses (which don't show) net out to what you save. That savings number is the only thing the calculator needs from those years.
On and after your free age, the assumption is that savings is no longer the focus. Instead, flexible income and lifestyle expenses take center stage.
There are exceptions. If you have a partner who continues working traditionally after you've achieved time freedom, keep the savings going past your free age.
Savings goes under Savings and Investments: hit “+Add.” You can enter it across a range of years, or as a single year if you're expecting an influx of money.
Big future expenses go under Lifestyle Expenses: same “+Add.” One-time expenses, multi-year expenses like college, whatever you've got. They're all positioned in relation to the age of the person you're planning for, and you can add as many as you want.
Those are two different things.
Zeros and a mostly empty chart mean you haven't finished filling in your numbers. The chart starts drawing the moment you've entered five key fields (shown in light gray… in a way that depicts a number is missing!), so you'll see something rough before you're done. Scroll back down and keep going.
Red means you run out of money before the end of your plan. That doesn't mean you failed. It means the original guess you had—usually about how long you'd do flexible work, or how much you'd spend—isn't aligned yet. So now you can start to adjust.
The fields
There are five key fields:
- Living expenses. Cutting costs reduces how much you need to live on, which speeds up your path to time freedom.
- Total savings. When your portfolio is small, saving more is one way to make significant progress.
- Investment return. You can improve returns over time by becoming a better investor. Start by reading my bonus chapter at timefreedom.life/fastfollow.
- Inflation rate. Your personal inflation rate can be adjusted. If you have greater control over your costs—a long-term fixed mortgage, for instance—start with a small reduction of 0.5%. It can make a big difference over time.
- Flexible income. Earning more, or working longer in a way that fits your lifestyle, speeds up your path to time freedom.
It is not your marginal tax rate. It's the overall tax charged on the money you're bringing in.
We could get really complicated with taxes, and there are a lot of strategies to bring these numbers down. This field is a single approximation of all of it.
It defaults to 20%. If you're on flexible income and not bringing in that much, it can probably go down to 10%. I've seen it go up to 25%. If you want to be safer, go higher.
What it actually does is gross up the difference between your after-tax and pre-tax amounts. When your expenses exceed your income, you have to pull more out of savings than the shortfall itself, because some of that money is going to the tax man.
Usually between 2% and 4%.
This is eroding purchasing power, and it's a highly impactful number in the calculator. Small changes compound into large differences over a plan that runs 40 or 50 years.
If you have greater control over your costs than most people do, adjust it down. Start with a reduction of half a percent and watch what it does to the table.
You have three choices: start now, start at your free age, or never. The default is now.
Now is right most of the time. From today into the future, your dollars inflate, so the money you need to spend is inflation-adjusted. That's an important fact and it's why it's the default.
Never is for things that genuinely don't inflate. Some pensions are fixed and stay fixed. Or you've set a goal—say netting $400,000 for a house in ten years—and that value should hold.
At your free age is the middle setting, and it usually comes down to feel. If you look at what an expense becomes in five years with inflation running from today and it just feels too high, this pulls it back. The fixed mortgage again: if most of your lifestyle expense is a payment that isn't moving, inflating all of it starting now is too much.
And remember, we're approximating. If a number looks wrong, go to the table and see what it's actually producing. You'll see directly how a $120,000 expense ten years out becomes much more than $120,000 when it's inflating at 3%.
Because the research says spending comes down later in life, and my own eyes say the same thing. I think about my 90-year-old Grandma Geri—she wasn't doing much spending at that point in her life.
Even with healthcare in the picture, you're just not as active as you once were. Your life gets simpler (and that’s okay). If you are worried about healthcare, create a separate healthcare expense as a short-term Lifestyle Expense that kicks in later in life.
The default is a 10% reduction at age 70. Both parts are yours to change. Sometimes it's not 70—it might be 80—and you can take the reduction down to nothing if you don't buy the premise.
Because most people don't invest the same way at 45 that they do at 75.
The defaults are 8% early and 5% later, with a transition age you set yourself. The drop is there because a lot of people move into safer assets as they get older by adding more bonds and their returns come down.
All three numbers can be changed. And I'll say this: I teach a way to keep earning the higher rate throughout your investing life, with limited downside risk. If that's interesting to you, get the bonus chapter at timefreedom.life/fastfollow. Then you might model it as a single rate the whole way through and see what that does.
Reading your results
What you have at the end of your life—money for a child, or a cause, or whoever you want to give it to.
Green means positive, but read it with some judgment. If you end up with $1 you're technically green, and if you meant to leave something behind, that isn't good enough. Adjust your numbers until the legacy value reflects what you actually intend.
The key thing is that each row is a year. You've got your year and your age, your starting balance on the left and your ending balance on the right. Everything in the middle explains how you got from one to the other.
The formula is:
Starting balance + savings + investment gains − pre-tax expenses = ending balance
Here's an example. Your starting balance is $762,000. Savings and investment gains add $53,000—those two grow the amount of money you have. Your expenses exceed your income by $34,000, but the number the table uses is $43,000, not $34,000, because that's the pre-tax figure. To actually spend $34,000 you have to draw down more than that, since some of it goes to the government.
So: $762,000 + $53,000 − $43,000 = $772,000. That's your ending balance, and it drops down to become the starting balance of the next year.
Want to know why a particular year looks the way it does? Find the age in the table, then look at your inputs below. If there's a college expense at 47 and a standard expected yearly lifestyle expense at 47, they add up, and you'll see it.
Use the table any time you adjust numbers and want to see them flow through. We've done ample testing, but always double-check your work in the table. That's how you get comfortable that you have what you need.
Working with scenarios
You don't have to. Every field auto-saves as you type, and the chart and table update immediately.
Give the scenario a name so you can find it again—I called the one in the tutorial videos “Tutorial Base Case.”
Getting help
This is a self-managed tool. There's help text on every field, and the tutorial videos go through the calculator field by field. That covers most of it.
If you'd like to work through your own situation with me directly, I offer one-on-one calculator sessions for a fee—you can schedule using this link.
And if you have an idea for how to make the tool better, I'd like to hear it. Email me at brian@timefreedom.life.
