How this calculator works

It answers one question: if you stop working and live off your savings, does the money outlast you? Nobody knows what markets will do, so instead of betting everything on one guessed average return, it replays your plan through every stretch of real financial history we have, from 1871 to today, and counts how often you would have come out fine. The charts below are live: drag a slider and the simulation re-runs in front of you.

Why replay history instead of picking an average

A retirement is a long string of good and bad years, and the order of those years matters as much as the average. Retiring just before a crash is a completely different experience from retiring just after one, even when the long-run average is identical, because once you are living off the pot, a bad early run sells off shares you can never buy back. Averaging that away hides the exact risk you care about.

So the tool takes your plan, how much you have, how much you spend, how it is invested, and runs it as if you had retired in 1871. Then again in 1872, then 1873, through every starting year with enough history left to cover your whole retirement. Each run is one cycle, a complete retirement that actually could have happened. With ~150 years of data and a 40-year plan, that is about 110 cycles.

Historical or Monte Carlo

Which to trust? History is only a handful of independent long runs, so it can be a little kind; the reshuffle explores far more orderings but can be a touch wild, since it breaks the gentle mean reversion real markets show. The honest answer usually sits between, so it is worth looking at both. The MC runs dropdown on the calculator sets how many reshuffled paths to draw - more runs give a steadier number. You can also confine the reshuffle to a recent window, the modern S&P era from 1928 or the live-MSCI-World era from 1970, when the thin deep-history proxy feels like a stretch.

What happens in a single year

Inside every cycle the calculator walks one year at a time. The order is deliberate, and matches the reference tool (engaging-data's "Rich, Broke or Dead") so the results line up:

Money comes out before the year's growth, the cautious assumption: you cannot spend a return you have not earned yet. Cash earns a real short-term interest rate (not zero, and not magically tracking inflation), and fund fees are charged on stocks and bonds only, never on cash. A cycle "fails" the first year its balance hits zero.

Spending flexibility (optional)

Real people don't spend the exact same amount every year: in a bad stretch you tighten the belt, then ease off when things recover. Two fields let you model that. You set a floor (the least you'd live on) and a trigger (how far your savings must fall before you react). While the pot stays above the trigger you spend your full plan; at or below it the calculator works out what the pot can still safely carry, and you spend that, never below your floor.

How big is the cut? Once you're at or below the trigger, the calculator spreads what's left over the years you still have to go, the way you'd budget a fixed jar of cash, using a cautious return. That gives the most you could spend this year and still have it last. You spend the smaller of that figure or your full plan, and never less than your floor. So a shallow dip the pot can easily ride out trims nothing, a deep or drawn-out slump trims more (down to the floor), and a recovery lifts you straight back to the full plan. If your plan is over-ambitious to begin with, that means a trim from the very first year; a comfortable plan spends the full amount until a bad stretch forces a cut.

Cutting a little early often saves you from running out later, so a flexible plan is far more robust. The Spending Cuts chart shows, year by year, how often and how deep you'd have to cut.

A €1,000,000 pot spending €50,000/yr (5%) for 40 years, tax-free baseline, Monte Carlo. Drag the slider: bigger cuts only bite when the pot is struggling, yet they turn many failures into survivals.

Try it: rich, broke or dead

This is exactly what the calculator draws. The top chart stacks up, for each age, what fraction of those ~110 cycles ended in each state, so a vertical slice reads as "out of everyone who retired with this plan, here is how they were doing at this age". The greens are success measured against your starting balance in today's money (a thin light band means the money survived but shrank; a thick dark top means it grew several times over); the red is the share that went broke. The grey band is different: it has nothing to do with money. It is the chance, from mortality tables, that you are simply no longer alive at that age, because "the plan fails at 97" is not much of a failure if most people are gone by then.

The second chart shows the same cycles as balance trajectories: the median line with its 25–75 and 10–90 percentile ribbons, in multiples of your starting pot. Both darken to the right as the odds of still being alive fall. Drag the sliders and watch raising your spending swell the red, or more stocks widen both the good and the bad tails.

A fixed €1,000,000 starting pot, a plain capital-gains-tax-free baseline, no pension income; the calculator itself lets you set all of those and dozens of tax regimes.

What the money is invested in

You pick a stock index (the US S&P 500, or MSCI World), a bond type (US Treasuries, or a developed-world government bond index), and how much sits in cash. Each series tracks the same index a mainstream fund would (MSCI World like IWDA, the world government bond like IGLO), gross of the fund's fee, which the calculator deducts separately. Every series is a real total return: dividends and coupons reinvested, then adjusted for that year's inflation, so a "7%" year means 7% of actual purchasing power gained. The full year-by-year data, with a growth-of-1 chart, lives on the Datasets page.

Currencies and inflation

Inflation does two jobs in every run: it grows your spending target so your lifestyle keeps its real value, and it converts the final balances back to today's money. Each currency carries its own consumer-price history, so the inflation you live through depends on the currency you pick:

• US dollar, US CPI (Robert Shiller, 1871–2023, then the official figure for 2024–25).
• Euro, Netherlands HICP: the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor series to 2020 (the harmonised index since 1996, a Dutch consumer-price reconstruction before that), then Eurostat's NL HICP from 2021.
• Swiss franc, Swiss CPI from the same database, then SNB / Federal-Statistical-Office figures.
• British pound, UK CPI from the same database to 2020, then official UK figures.

Swiss inflation has historically been the lowest and the US and UK the highest, so a franc plan assumes the gentlest cost-of-living drift, a dollar or pound plan the steepest. That gap is the single biggest reason the same portfolio can look different in different currencies. (The cumulative price curves are on the Datasets page.)

The market returns need one honest caveat. There is no clean century of euro or franc stock data, and the historical guilder/dollar and franc/dollar exchange rates are mangled by the gold standard and the world wars (the guilder more than doubled against the dollar in a single post-war year). Splicing those in would inject volatility that never really hit a long-term investor. So instead of converting by exchange rate, the tool converts by purchasing-power parity: it takes each asset's dollar return, strips out US inflation to get the pure real return, then re-applies the local currency's own inflation. The result is that the real return on stocks and bonds is identical in every currency; only the inflation overlay and the local cash rate differ. Over long horizons real exchange rates barely drift, so this is closer to an investor's lived experience than pretending the broken historical FX was real, and it gives the euro and franc the same full 1871 history the dollar has. The one place a real exchange rate is used is foreign tax thresholds, so a regime denominated in francs, krone or dollars still makes sense viewed in euros.

One consequence worth being explicit about: this means the model carries no exchange-rate risk between your currency and the assets you hold. A real Swiss franc investor holding US or World equities lived through genuine currency swings that periodically helped or hurt; here, changing the currency dropdown only changes your inflation path and local cash rate, never the shape of the underlying stock and bond returns.

Taxes, country by country

This is the feature the tool was built for. The same portfolio finishes very differently depending on where you live, so it computes more than thirty-five tax regimes across 33 countries at once, from Europe through North America to Asia-Pacific (Japan, Singapore), and shows them side by side. Each is built from primary sources (national tax authorities, PwC country summaries) and re-checked against the current tax year; the point is never the headline rate but what each system taxes and when. Strip away the country labels and there are only a handful of mechanisms:

• Tax only realised gains. Nothing is owed until you sell, and only on the gain, not the part that is just your own money coming back; everything unsold keeps compounding untaxed. (An Unrealised gain % field in Advanced settings says how much of your pot is already profit, so sales are taxed realistically from day one.) The lightest shape for a long holder, and the most common: the generic capital-gains regime, Portugal's flat 28%, Belgium's new 10%, Estonia, Poland and many more. Several drop the rate to 0% once you have held long enough (Slovenia after 15 years, Hungary's TBSZ after 5, Czechia after 3, Croatia after 2), and a few never tax investment gains at all (Switzerland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Singapore, and EU funds in Greece).
• Tax gains as ordinary income. No separate rate: the gain is added to income and run through the progressive brackets. Canada counts half of each gain; the US and UK fold gains into income-style bands, the US taxing the first slice at 0%.
• Tax a deemed or whole-portfolio return every year. You are charged on paper gains you have not sold. The Dutch Box 3, Germany's Vorabpauschale, Sweden's ISK, Denmark's foreign-ETF rules and Ireland's eight-year "deemed disposal" all work this way, and because they bite in flat and falling years too, they punish a bad run harder than the headline rate suggests.
• Charge an annual wealth tax. A small percentage of your whole net worth every year, win or lose: Norway (~1% above a threshold), Switzerland, the Spanish regions that still levy it, and smaller versions in Italy and Belgium.
• Mandatory health insurance on top. Several countries layer a health cost on the tax that can outweigh it: a flat per-head premium (Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria, the Netherlands, Japan, several central-European states), an income-scaled contribution (Germany's ~21% on capital income, France's 6.5% CSM), an age-rated private premium that climbs steeply with age (Singapore), or the US, where a pre-65 retiree buys ACA cover whose subsidy vanishes above four times the poverty line and a post-65 one pays Medicare plus an income-tested surcharge. Where cover is genuinely tax-funded (the UK, Portugal, the Nordics) there is no such charge; Canada comes close, with only a small provincial premium in Ontario and Quebec. These health toggles can be switched off.

Most regimes combine two or three: Norway is a wealth tax plus an income tax on gains; Switzerland is a wealth tax plus a flat health premium and no gains tax at all; the US is a light income tax dominated by a heavy health cost. Where a modest income can elect a cheaper assessment (Germany, Austria, France, the Dutch tax credit, Spain's wealth-tax cap), the cheaper one is applied automatically, as any filer would. That is the whole reason a side-by-side beats any single rate. Below, the same €1,500,000 and the same spending, taxed in a dozen countries. Drag the spend slider, switch what you are measuring, and toggle countries on and off:

Health insurance is included where it is mandatory and not tax-funded (Switzerland, Germany, the US, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg here), since for those countries it is part of the real cost of living there. Every monetary threshold, exemption and bracket grows with inflation in the simulation, the way real tax systems adjust, so a multi-decade run is not quietly dragged into higher brackets by inflation alone. Health premiums are the one exception: they drift a little above inflation (fading over the decades), as they always have in reality.

Pensions and tax-free pots

By default the money sits in a plain taxable brokerage account, the only fair common ground for comparing countries. But most people also hold tax-advantaged accounts, so you can add two more pots on top of your savings:

• A tax-free wrapper (a US Roth, a UK ISA, a Canadian TFSA, a Japanese NISA): it grows and is withdrawn completely tax-free, and stays out of the US health-subsidy income test.
• A pre-tax / pension pot (a 401(k) or IRA, a Dutch lijfrente, a Swiss pillar, a French PER, a UK SIPP, an RRSP, and so on): never taxed going in, so every withdrawal is taxed as ordinary income at the country's progressive brackets, a second tax system layered on the capital tax above. You set the age it unlocks; until then it is locked but still invested, so an early retiree has to bridge the gap from the other pots.

Both pots name a home country, because the calculator's real use is comparing where to retire. A wrapper or pension keeps its home rules even when you live elsewhere: a US Roth is tax-free for a US resident but counts as an ordinary taxable account to, say, a German taxman, and a pension built abroad loses the destination's local pension breaks. The pots are drawn in the tax-efficient order, the taxable account first, then the pension, and the tax-free wrapper last so it compounds untouched as long as possible; when a plan uses them, a "how your spending is funded" chart shows which pot pays for each year.

Cost of living

Comparing countries at the same number of euros is misleading, because the same euros buy very different lives in Lisbon and Zürich. Tick Adjust spending for local cost of living and each country's spending is rescaled to the same standard of living, priced from your home country, so the table compares the same lifestyle taxed locally instead of the same nominal amount.

The price levels are real Numbeo "Cost of Living Plus Rent" prices, averaged over each country's 2–3 largest cities because a relocating retiree lands in a city. Two adjustments make them fit a multi-decade plan: an exchange-rate correction (for the non-euro countries we strip out the snapshot rate Numbeo converts at and use each currency's fair value, so a transiently weak krona does not make Sweden look permanently cheap), and a recognition that the gap depends on how much you spend (a higher spender's extra money goes to travel and online orders that cost about the same everywhere, so the gap narrows toward parity as you spend more). It also lets cheaper countries catch up in real prices over the decades while the expensive ones stay expensive; the drift is deliberately slow and only ever upward, the cautious assumption. You can drag a spend slider on the datasets page to watch it move.

The numbers under the table

Each row is a tax model. The middle column shows whichever question you picked (below). The third, where it goes, is a small stacked bar that splits that model's outcome into four parts, with the median amount and the effective tax as a %/yr above it:

• Kept is what is left for you, the middle cycle's ending balance in today's money.
• Tax Paid is the median lifetime tax actually paid across the years.
• Tax Owed is the tax still deferred at the end, owed only if you sold everything.
• Lost Growth is the compounding the tax cost you by not staying invested. None of these is a flat percentage: the rules are progressive, so the split moves with the path.

The Compare tabs read the same plan four ways. The other columns recompute to match, and clicking a row drops that figure into your plan:

• Will it last - the chance your money survives the whole retirement at your spending.
• Safe spend - the most you could spend and still last 90% of the time.
• FIRE number - the smallest nest egg that sustains that spending at 90%.
• Years to FIRE - the one question about building up rather than drawing down: starting from today's savings and adding what you save each year, how many years until you could retire in that country. Those years are an accumulation phase (you save, you don't spend the pot); the drawdown begins at the retire age you set, and clicking a country fills that age in so the chart shows the full journey.

What it can and cannot tell you

This is a model, not a forecast or financial advice. History is the best evidence we have, but the future is not obliged to rhyme with it: the next 40 years could be worse than anything in the record. The cycles overlap and share years, so they are not fully independent samples. Tax law, especially the not-yet-enacted Dutch regime, can change. Mortality is a population average, not you. And it models a steady mechanical plan, not the real human tendency to adjust, panic, or carry on working. Treat the output as a way to compare choices and see the shape of the risk, not as a promise.

Where the data comes from

Every market series models a real, investable index, the same one a mainstream index fund tracks, gross of the fund's fee (the calculator deducts the fee separately):

• US stocks & inflation: the S&P 500 total return and US CPI from Robert Shiller (Yale), 1871–2023, via engaging-data, then the official figures for 2024–25. This is the exact series the calculator reproduces to the decimal.
• US Treasury bond: the constant-maturity 10-year Treasury total return from NYU-Stern / Aswath Damodaran ("US T. Bond (10-year)"), 1928–2025, with the database below filling 1871–1927.
• World stocks: the MSCI World gross index in US dollars, 1970 on, the benchmark behind iShares Core MSCI World (IWDA), with a GDP-weighted developed-market proxy before that.
• World government bond: the FTSE World Government Bond Index (WGBI), the benchmark behind iShares Global Government Bond (IGLO), GDP-weighted across developed markets with the US slice on the 10-year Treasury above, and a proxy before 1985.
• Euro/Swiss bonds & cash, exchange rates, and the deep history: the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database (1870–2020). Please cite Jordà, Schularick and Taylor (2017), "Macrofinancial History and the New Business Cycle Facts", and Jordà, Knoll, Kuvshinov, Schularick and Taylor (2019), "The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015", QJE 134(3).
• Recent years (2021–25): FRED (US T-bill, exchange rates), ECB (€STR) and Eurostat (NL HICP), and SNB / Swiss Federal Statistical Office (SARON, Swiss CPI).
• Mortality: Eurostat life tables for Europe and the US Social Security tables, with healthy and smoker variants scaled from real per-age ratios.
• Taxes: each country's rules from its national tax authority and the matching PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, re-checked against the current tax year, for every regime in the table. The Numbeo cost-of-living index backs the optional standard-of-living adjustment.
• The whole approach follows engaging-data's "Rich, Broke or Dead", rebuilt from primary sources and extended with tax regimes and currencies. The US, S&P, no-cash case reproduces it to the decimal.

Every chart on this page is generated live from the calculator's own engine and data, in your browser, as you move the controls.