Calculators / Barista FIRE
Barista FIRE calculator
Barista FIRE is leaving the career job while some income still comes in. A small, steady paycheck does more to your retirement date than almost anything else you can change, because every dollar it covers is a dollar the portfolio no longer has to fund twenty-five times over.
After tax, per year, household. The income you would still be happy to earn.
After this the portfolio carries everything.
Why a small income moves the date so much
Under a 4% withdrawal rate, every $1,000 of annual spending needs $25,000 of portfolio behind it. Turn that around: $22,000 of part-time income is doing the work of $550,000 in invested assets, for as long as you keep earning it.
That is why the years-saved figure above is usually larger than people expect from a job they describe as barely worth doing. It is not the wage that matters, it is the multiple you avoid having to build.
The part everyone under-models
Barista FIRE assumes you can still earn when you want to. Health, the job market and the willingness to go back to work at 58 are all real variables, and the plan is more fragile than full FIRE by design. Setting the part-time years above to something shorter than you expect is a cheap way to see how much of the plan depends on that assumption holding.
The other quiet cost: those years of lower income are usually years of no contributions and sometimes small withdrawals, right at the start of retirement. If markets are poor in that window, the damage is larger than the same losses later. That is sequence-of-returns risk, and part-time income is one of the better defences against it, because it lets you take less out of the portfolio in bad years.
Model both incomes, not one
Most Barista FIRE plans belong to a couple where one person goes first. NestEgg runs two incomes, two retirement ages and one shared date, which is the version of this question people actually argue about.