ExitYear is a free retirement and FIRE projection calculator that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. There is no account and no tracking. It is an open-access modeling tool and the computational engine behind ExitYear's YouTube financial teardowns.

It's free and will stay free: no paywalls, no logins, no accounts, and no tracking. Everything computes locally in your browser. If it saved you from building the spreadsheet yourself and you feel like saying thanks, you can buy me a coffee. No pressure either way.

I wanted an honest picture of my own retirement math, and I could not find one.

Most free FIRE calculators do the same thin thing. You enter a starting balance, a yearly contribution, and one rate of return. It runs one compound-interest formula and hands you a single reassuring number. No debt. No taxes. No sense of whether the money actually lasts. I did not trust the answer, and I did not trust that I should.

So I built the version I wanted. It simulates your finances month by month, models your debts, and tells you if and roughly when you run out of money. Originally built as a paid product, I pivoted ExitYear into an open-access, browser-based simulation engine powered by YouTube teardowns and transparent affiliate partnerships.

ExitYear was built and is maintained by independent software engineers who wanted an uncompromised, honest picture of their own financial projections.

The engine is an ~8,000-line client-side TypeScript system developed to run 100% in the user's browser without servers, tracking, or commercial gatekeeping. Direct questions, suggestions, or feedback to hello@exityear.com.

Three things guide how this tool works.

Privacy first. Everything runs in your browser. Your numbers never leave your device, there is no sign-up, and nothing is logged. Your plan is saved in your browser's local storage and survives tab closures, but if you clear browser data without exporting first, it is gone.

No nudging. This is an instrument, not a funnel. It does not push you toward a product, a decision, or a feeling. It shows its work and lets you draw your own conclusions.

Honest about what it is. This is an estimate, not financial advice. It's a projection based on the assumptions you give it. Good assumptions in, useful picture out. Bad assumptions in, and it will confidently draw you a wrong one.

A basic calculator runs one formula: a starting balance, a flat yearly contribution, and a single rate, compounded to a number. That is fine for a rough gut check and wrong for almost everything else. Here is what this does instead.

• Simulates month by month all the way to your life expectancy, instead of collapsing everything into one lump formula.
• Models real debt. Mortgages, auto loans, and student loans amortize and pay down properly. Credit cards and revolving debt use minimum payments. All balances are subtracted from your net worth.
• Grows your income over time for raises and promotions, and lets income streams start and stop at ages you choose.
• Handles one-time and recurring life events: a home purchase, an inheritance, tuition, a wedding.
• Treats retirement spending as different from spending now, with optional geographic arbitrage. Retire somewhere cheaper and your living costs scale by that city’s cost of living.
• Lets you decide what happens to leftover income each month: save it to cash, invest it in brokerage, split it 50/50, pay down debt or mortgage principal, or spend it.
• Separates real returns from nominal ones by adjusting the default return for inflation, and offers a flat tax rate so you can see an after-tax picture.
• Models dividends natively with decoupled total returns. It isolates capital appreciation from cash yield, shifts from DRIP reinvestment to cash payouts at retirement, tracks taxable basis additions, and lets you test living on dividends without selling shares.
• Detects shortfalls. If you run out of money, it tells you, and roughly when.

They ignore your debt entirely. They assume you contribute the same flat amount forever. They skip taxes and treat inflation loosely or not at all. They cannot model a move to a cheaper city or a windfall that changes everything.

Standard FIRE calculators also force a blunt assumption: you must sell a flat 4% of your shares every year, even during market crashes. They cannot model organic dividend cash flow. They treat dividend yield as free money on top of price growth, ignore annual tax drag on reinvested dividends in taxable accounts, and cannot test whether you can live off cash payouts without selling shares. Worst of all, they give you one comfortable number and no idea whether it holds up over a real life.

This is an illustrative estimate, not financial advice. The main chart runs your assumptions forward in a baseline projection. While the integrated Monte Carlo panel models market volatility and sequence of returns risk, real life includes factors no model can foresee. Use it to understand the shape of your plan and to pressure-test your assumptions, not as the final word on your money.