FIRE Flowchart
Where does the next dollar go?
This app answers that step by step, and the answer branches: some steps ask about your own situation and send you down one limb rather than the other. Its target is built from spending you have measured, never from what you earn or a round number. What decides how long the walk takes is your savings rate, not your income and not the market.
It is written for a complete beginner and assumes no prior investing knowledge. It runs to a couple of dozen steps and you do not have to finish in one sitting. Reading them is the short part; carrying them out usually takes years. One of the first asks you to start a record of what you spend, and a record like that takes a month to be worth anything, so begin it as soon as you meet it and read on while it fills.
Learn the words
The idea, and the words the rest of this uses, before anything asks you to move a dollar. Nothing here takes longer than reading it.
where you are now
Know what you spend
Both expense figures the rest of this depends on come out of here. The record behind them keeps running after this.
ahead of you
Secure the floor
Cash, the match, and expensive debt. The half every published ordering agrees on. Building the cash and clearing the debt takes months or years.
ahead of you
Fill the shelters
An HSA, an IRA, a workplace plan: the accounts a tax break comes with. Where the published orderings stop agreeing, so the app says what it chose. The shelters take in only so much each year.
ahead of you
Size and hold the plan
The target, the rate it rests on, the mix behind that, and the habit that keeps it. Decided here and revisited for decades.
ahead of you
See the whole path
What this app is, and what it is not