Your FIRE Number Workbook: Calculating Financial Independence Step by Step

Reading about the 4% rule is one thing. Sitting down with your own income, expenses, and timeline and producing a specific dollar figure you can actually plan toward is another. This course walks you through every step of that calculation — not with generic hypotheticals, but with templates you fill in using your own numbers. By the end of this course you will be able to produce a complete, personalized FIRE number calculation, test it against multiple withdrawal rate and expense scenarios, and document the assumptions that drive it so you can update the calculation as your situation evolves. What you will learn: - How to build a projected retirement expense budget — line by line — using a structured template provided in the course - Adjusting expense estimates for life stage: what will cost more, what will cost less, and what is genuinely uncertain - Calculating your FIRE number under three withdrawal rate scenarios (3.5%, 4%, 4.5%) and seeing the impact on your target - How to factor part-time income, rental income, or dividend income into the calculation to reduce the required portfolio size - Modeling the impact of retiring at different ages (40, 45, 50, 55) on the size of the portfolio needed - Using a simple compound growth worksheet to estimate how long it will take to reach your number at different savings and investment return rates - Building a FIRE timeline: from current net worth to target portfolio, with milestones at each 25% increment - Stress-testing your number: what if inflation is higher? What if returns are lower for the first five years of retirement? The course is organized as a sequential workbook. Each section asks you to fill in a specific part of the calculation and provides a worked example alongside your template. By the final section you will have a single document containing your current projection, the key assumptions behind it, and a sensitivity table showing how changes to those assumptions affect your timeline. This course is suitable for people who are ready to do the actual math on their FIRE journey and want a step-by-step, template-supported process. No prior financial planning experience is required. You will need access to your own income and expense figures to complete the exercises fully.