Bitcoin FIRE calculator
FIRE stands for financial independence, retire early: the point where a portfolio can fund your living costs without a salary. This page starts from a real dollar-cost averaging plan, meaning a fixed amount of Bitcoin bought on a fixed schedule. It computes what that plan would have accumulated at historical prices, then projects how far it is from covering your spending. It also explains why that projection deserves more skepticism than most retirement math.
What $100 every week since 2020 built
Total invested
$34,600
346 purchases
Stack today
$77,414
1.2181 BTC
Return
+124%
+24.2% annualized
Worst drawdown
−69.6%
Deepest fall from a previous high
At a spending baseline of $4,000 a month, the 4% rule puts the target at $1,200,000, or about 18.882 BTC at today's price of $63,553. This plan is 6.5% of the way there, while contributing $5,200 a year. Change the spending figure in the tool below and every number moves with it.
What a safe withdrawal rate is, and where 4% came from
A safe withdrawal rate answers one question. What percentage of a portfolio can you spend in year one, raising it with inflation every year after, without the portfolio running dry before you do? Multiply the reciprocal by your annual spending and you get a FIRE number. At 4%, that reciprocal is 25, which is why the shorthand is “25 times your annual expenses”.
The 4% figure is not a law of finance. It came out of William Bengen's 1994 paper and the 1998 Trinity Study. Both ran rolling 30-year retirements over US stock and bond returns going back to 1926. Bengen found that a portfolio holding roughly 50–75% equities never ran dry inside 30 years at a 4% initial withdrawal. The Trinity authors, running their own data, reported success rates of about 95% to 98% for those mixes rather than a clean 100%. Every part of that is a constraint: one country, one century, a diversified portfolio, a 30-year horizon, no taxes, and no fees.
Those constraints matter even for the asset class it was derived from. Apply the same method to non-US markets and the safe rate drops. Extend the horizon past 30 years and it drops again. The 4% rule is best understood as a planning heuristic that happened to work on a specific, unusually fortunate slice of history.
Why applying it to Bitcoin is contested
Withdrawal-rate research works by counting failures across many independent historical windows. That requires a long record. Bitcoin has traded for roughly fifteen years, which does not contain a single complete 30-year retirement, let alone enough of them to estimate a failure rate. Any confidence interval you have seen attached to a Bitcoin withdrawal rate was produced by a model, not by history.
The asset also behaves nothing like the portfolio the rule was fitted to. A 50/75 equity portfolio's worst historical drawdown, its deepest fall from a previous high, was roughly half. Bitcoin has fallen more than 70% from a high several times. Those declines are the ordinary behavior of the asset rather than a crisis exception. Bitcoin also produces no earnings, dividends or coupons, so there is no cash flow to fund withdrawals. Every withdrawal is a sale of principal. See the drawdown history for the full record.
Concentration compounds the problem. The 4% rule assumes diversification is doing work in the background: when equities fall, bonds and rebalancing cushion the withdrawals. A single-asset portfolio has no cushion, so a withdrawal during a decline sells the only thing you own at the worst possible price. That is why people planning around Bitcoin commonly use a lower rate than 4%. Others hold several years of spending outside Bitcoin, or stay flexible about how much they withdraw in bad years. None of that is advice. They are simply the adjustments the underlying math points at.
Sequence-of-returns risk, in plain terms
While you are accumulating, the order of returns barely matters and a crash is arguably good news: your contributions buy more. The moment you start withdrawing, order becomes the dominant variable. Two people can retire with the same amount and see the same average annual return over thirty years, and one runs out while the other dies rich. The only difference is when the bad years arrived.
The mechanism is simple. If you need a fixed amount of money each month and the price has fallen 70%, you must sell more than three times as many coins to raise it. Those coins are permanently gone, so they are not there for the recovery. A decline in the first five years of withdrawals does structural damage that a decline in the last five years does not.
The projection below has no sequence risk at all, because a constant growth rate has no sequence. That is the single biggest reason to treat its answer as a best case rather than an expectation. If you want to see the same problem from the spending side, the stack drawdown planner shows how quickly a withdrawal schedule eats a stack under bear assumptions.
Project the years to financial independence
Enter what you actually spend in a month. The tool converts that to a FIRE number at 4% and shows how much of it the stack above already covers. It then projects how many years of continued contributions it takes to close the gap, under three growth assumptions you can edit, including a falling price. The spending target rises 3% a year with inflation inside the projection, since that is what the 4% rule's definition assumes; the FIRE number shown stays in today's dollars.
When Could You Retire?
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. This is how long until your Bitcoin could cover your living costs.
What is the 4% rule?
The starting −20 / 0 / +20 are round numbers chosen to show a loss, no change, and a gain — not forecasts. Edit them.
What growth rate is even plausible?
The growth assumption dominates the answer, so it is worth seeing what the price has actually done. These are trailing compound annual growth rates, or CAGRs: the steady yearly rate that would have carried the price from one end of the window to the other. They come from the same price series the calculator uses.
| Window | Price then | Price now | Annualized |
|---|---|---|---|
| Last 3 yearsfrom Aug 2023 | $26,628 | $63,553 | +33.6% |
| Last 5 yearsfrom Aug 2021 | $44,672 | $63,553 | +7.3% |
| Last 10 yearsfrom Aug 2016 | $574.45 | $63,553 | +60.1% |
Trailing CAGR describes the past and swings wildly with the start date. For the same asset, a window that begins near a cycle bottom looks spectacular, and one that begins near a top looks dismal. It is not a forecast, and it is not what the next decade will do.
There is also an arithmetic ceiling worth keeping in mind. A rate that compounds at 50% a year for long enough implies a market value larger than every asset on earth combined. So a strongly positive scenario cannot persist indefinitely, whatever you believe about Bitcoin. The realistic use of this tool is comparison: see how many years separate your most pessimistic and most optimistic answers, and treat that spread as the real output.
What this projection is not
- •Not a probability. It returns one number per assumption, with no failure rate attached. Real withdrawal research reports success percentages precisely because a single path tells you nothing about risk.
- •No volatility path. Growth is applied smoothly once a year. There are no drawdowns in the projection, so there is no sequence risk in it either.
- •No taxes or fees. Capital gains on every sale, exchange fees, spreads and withdrawal costs are all excluded, and in a real drawdown phase they are not small.
- •Assumes you never stop. Contributions continue at the same rate every year until the target is hit, through every job loss and every 70% decline.
- •Assumes the asset survives. The model has no term for permanent loss, custody failure, or a regime where Bitcoin simply does not recover.
The methodology page documents the data sources, the exact DCA math behind the backtested stack, and every limitation we know about.
Common questions about Bitcoin and FIRE
What is a safe withdrawal rate, and where does the 4% rule come from?
A safe withdrawal rate is the share of a portfolio you can take in the first year of retirement, then adjust for inflation each year after, without running out over some planning horizon. The 4% figure comes from William Bengen's 1994 study and the 1998 Trinity Study. Both tested rolling 30-year retirements against US stock and bond returns from 1926 onward. Bengen found no 30-year failure at a 4% initial withdrawal for a portfolio holding roughly half to three quarters equities. The Trinity authors, running their own data, reported success rates of about 95% to 98% for those mixes rather than a clean 100%. That is the entire basis of the number: one country, one century, a diversified portfolio, a 30-year horizon, and no taxes or fees in the model.
Does the 4% rule work for Bitcoin?
There is no evidence that it does, and good reason to think it does not transfer. The rule was calibrated on a diversified portfolio whose worst drawdown, meaning its worst fall from a previous high, was roughly half. It still failed in stress tests outside the US. Bitcoin is a single asset with no cash flows, roughly fifteen years of price history, and repeated declines of 70% or more. Withdrawal-rate research depends on having enough independent historical windows to say anything about failure probability, and Bitcoin does not have them. This calculator uses 4% because it is the yardstick everyone recognizes, not because it has been validated for a volatile single asset. Many people planning around Bitcoin use a materially lower rate, or hold several years of spending in something that is not Bitcoin.
How much Bitcoin do I need to retire?
On the 4% rule the target is 25 times your annual spending. At today's price of $63,553, spending $40,000 a year implies a $1,000,000 target, or about 15.735 BTC. Spending $80,000 a year implies $2,000,000, or about 31.47 BTC. Those coin counts move every time the price does, which is precisely the problem with denominating a retirement target in a volatile asset: the same stack can look sufficient and insufficient within the same year.
What is sequence-of-returns risk?
It is the risk that the order of returns ruins you even when the average is fine. Two retirees can see identical average annual returns over thirty years and still end up in completely different places. The one who meets a deep decline in the first few years has to sell far more units to fund the same spending, and those units are gone before any recovery. Accumulating investors get the mirror image, where an early decline is a gift. This is the single largest reason a smooth constant-growth projection like the one on this page is optimistic. A constant growth rate has no sequence at all.
What growth rate should I assume for Bitcoin?
Nobody knows, and any single number you pick will dominate the result. For reference, the trailing compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the Bitcoin price on this page's data is +33.6% over 3 years, +7.3% over 5 years, +60.1% over 10 years. That is the steady yearly rate that would have taken the price from one end of the window to the other. Trailing CAGR is extremely sensitive to the start date, and it describes the past rather than forecasting anything. Growth rates for an asset this young also have no reason to stay stable. A return that compounds at a high rate indefinitely implies a total market value that eventually exceeds everything else in existence. So the sensible use of this tool is to compare scenarios rather than to trust one.
Is this projection a prediction of when I will retire?
No. It is arithmetic on assumptions you supply. It compounds a constant growth rate and assumes you keep contributing at the same rate without interruption. It ignores taxes, exchange fees and spreads, ignores the possibility of a permanent loss, and reports a single path rather than a probability. Read the gap between the falling-price and rising-price scenarios as the honest message. The answer is not a date. It is a very wide range that depends on something unknowable.
Run your own numbers
The full calculator backtests any schedule, cadence, fee level and date range you like, and carries the same FIRE projection alongside the rest of the results.
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Not financial advice. This page is an educational projection built on assumptions you choose, not a retirement plan and not a promise of returns. Past performance does not guarantee future results, Bitcoin is volatile, and you can lose money.