Estimate the age at which your investments could cover your living costs, using Canadian retirement income rules. Enter your spending, savings, and current portfolio and the calculator projects a range of outcomes rather than a single number. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored.
Run the numbers
Annual expenses, current portfolio, and annual savings are the three that matter most. The rest have sensible defaults you can leave alone.
What the projection assumes
- A 4% withdrawal rate
- Your target — the "FIRE number" — is 25 times your annual spending. That is the usual starting point, not a guarantee; it comes from studies of historical US market returns over 30-year retirements.
- Returns in today's dollars
- Your expected return is adjusted for the inflation rate you enter, so every figure on the chart is real purchasing power. A 6% return with 2.5% inflation is modelled as roughly 3.4% real.
- 1,000 simulated market paths
- Rather than assuming you earn the same return every year, the projection runs a thousand randomised paths and shows the middle 80% of outcomes as a band. The randomness is seeded, so the same inputs always produce the same projection.
- CPP and OAS as a flat amount
- When enabled, combined CPP and OAS are modelled as $15,000 a year starting at 65, cut by 15% if your income is high enough to trigger the OAS clawback. Your real entitlement depends on your contribution history and when you start collecting.
- Saving stops at freedom
- Once the portfolio can cover your spending, contributions stop and it is left to grow on its own. The projection runs to age 90.
- Home equity stays put unless you downsize
- A primary residence you keep contributes nothing to withdrawals. Choosing "downsize at 65" releases 30% of your equity into the portfolio at that age.
Why the Canadian version is different
Most financial independence material online is written for a US audience, and several of its load-bearing assumptions do not survive the border. Canadians have no equivalent of the 401(k), registered accounts behave differently on withdrawal, and an RRSP must be converted to a RRIF with mandatory minimum withdrawals — which can push taxable income up exactly when you were hoping to keep it low.
Retiring early also changes what government benefits are worth to you. CPP is based on your contribution history, so stopping work in your forties reduces it. OAS is clawed back above an income threshold, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement is income-tested in a way that treats RRSP and TFSA withdrawals very differently. Healthcare, the single largest wildcard in American early-retirement planning, is a far smaller line item here.
The guide to FIRE in Canada works through each of these in detail, including RRSP meltdown strategies and how CPP timing interacts with an early retirement date.
Related
See how your income and net worth compare with other Canadians to fill in the numbers above with real figures.