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How much do you need to retire at 45? The target, the saving rate, and the 50 years after

By DecisionSheet · Updated · 2026 tax figures

Retiring at 45 asks two questions the usual retirement arithmetic skips. The portfolio has to be built in fifteen working years rather than forty, and it then has to last fifty, not thirty. The FIRE simulator answers both for one household: the target, the saving that reaches it on time, and how often the result survives a 50-year retirement across 1,000 simulated markets. All figures are in today's dollars; the simulator works in real returns.

The household

The target

The target is spending divided by the withdrawal rate: 25 times spending at 4%, 28.6 times at 3.5%, 30.8 times at 3.25%.

Withdrawal rate Target Saving a year to reach it by 45 A month
4% $1,500,000 $49,000 $4,083
3.5% $1,714,286 $58,000 $4,833
3.25% $1,846,154 $64,000 $5,333

Each saving figure is the smallest round thousand that reaches its target within 15 years, with the portfolio growing at the calculator's blended real return and the saving added once a year. The calculator's default saving of $45,000 a year gets to the 4% target in 16 years, at 46: open that scenario. The years move quickly with the saving: $30,000 a year takes 20 years (age 50), $60,000 takes 14 (age 44).

Calculator summary tiles for the 4% plan: FIRE target $1,500,000, reached in 15 years saving $49,000 a year, Monte Carlo survival 88.9% over a 50-year retirement, and a median ending balance of $10.1M.

Those are large savings on a $60,000 budget, and that is the point about early retirement that the target number hides. With fifteen years of compounding rather than forty, most of the portfolio has to come from contributions, not growth.

Does it last fifty years?

The simulator starts the retirement from the balance actually reached, $1,546,520 in the median run after the first year's withdrawal at 4%, a little above the target because the last year of saving overshoots it. It then draws 1,000 market histories from the same return and volatility assumptions, withdraws $60,000 a year adjusted for inflation, and counts the runs that have money left at 95.

Withdrawal rate Runs that last 50 years Across 6 draws of 1,000 Median ending balance 10th percentile
4% 88.9% (111 run out) 85.3% to 88.9% $10,141,560 $0
3.5% 93.9% (61 run out) 91.9% to 93.9% $14,478,925 $1,256,153
3.25% 95.8% (42 run out) 94.2% to 95.8% $17,420,604 $2,140,864

At 4% the portfolio lasts in roughly nine runs in ten. The first run goes empty in year 16, at age 61, and by year 46 (age 91) the 10th percentile is at zero: one run in ten has nothing left with years still to go. The same plan over a conventional 30-year retirement lasts in 96.0% of runs (open it); the extra twenty years are what the early retiree is paying for.

Lowering the withdrawal rate to 3.5% buys 93.9%, and the 10th percentile ends with $1,256,153 rather than nothing. On every one of the 6 draws, 3.5% lasts more often than 4% and 3.25% more often than 3.5%; the exact percentages move by a few points between draws, which is why the table gives a range. Open the 3.5% scenario · the 3.25% scenario.

Fan chart of the 3.5% plan's 50-year retirement: the 90th, 50th and 10th percentile balances across 1,000 runs. The median line ends at $14.5M, the 90th percentile at $59.0M and the 10th percentile at $1.3M.

The median run at 4% ends at $10,141,560, 6.8 times the target: half of all futures end with far more money than needed. The spread between that and the empty 10th percentile is the whole difficulty of a fifty-year plan. A fixed real withdrawal takes no account of how the markets have gone; a retiree who trims spending after bad years would do better than these figures, and How withdrawal strategies compare runs the guardrails and variable-percentage versions on the same simulator.

What the simulation leaves out

Taxes on withdrawals, which depend on what kind of accounts the money is in; health insurance between 45 and Medicare, which for many early retirees is the largest line in the budget; Social Security, which arrives decades later and would help the worst runs; and any earned income after 45. The spending figure has to cover the first two, and leaving out the second two makes the success rates conservative. The assumptions behind the markets are the calculator's defaults, which Does the 4% rule survive a 40- or 50-year retirement? describes and stress-tests with a lower stock return.

Assumptions and limits

Method and sources

The model is calculateFire in the FIRE simulator. The target is spending divided by the withdrawal rate. The saving for each plan is found by searching upward in $1,000 steps for the smallest annual saving whose deterministic accumulation reaches the target within 15 years, and the data file checks that $1,000 less would not. The retirement phase draws annual returns from a normal distribution with the arithmetic mean implied by each asset's real compound return and volatility, rebalanced each year, and withdraws a fixed real amount. Every figure above comes from running it on the inputs in the scenario links.

Open this scenario in the calculator

All figures on this page come from the FIRE Simulator calculator. Change any input there and the numbers update.

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