Taxes by type
Federal, state, capital gains and payroll, year by year. A one-off, like selling a rental, stands out as its own spike.
FIREproof
Explore many proofs.
Build your FIRE.
FIREproof enables you to model, plan, and visualize your retirement… and all that happens along the way.
A retirement planning tool from the creator of cFIREsim.com, a mainstay in the retirement calculator world and FIRE community.
The verdict in plain words. How many historical start years your plan survives.
Every square is a real year. One per retirement start year since 1871. Orange ones needed a plan change.
Outcomes, not odds. A bad, a typical, and a good history, drawn on the same scale.
NEW THE TAXES TAB Pro
Know your taxes, year by year, before you retire.
Every year of every history settles like a real tax return: income tax, capital gains with cost basis, payroll tax, RMDs, and 72(t) SEPP. Now you can read the return.
Your lifetime tax bill, in one number
Federal, state, capital gains, and payroll, summed over the whole plan and split by type, with the peak year named.
Income against the brackets
See how each year's income fills 10%, 12%, and 22%, with your bracket-fill target drawn right on the chart.
The expensive years, flagged
RMDs, Medicare IRMAA surcharges, and the years you spill past your target, called out before they surprise you.
ONE PLAN, FOUR VIEWS
Four ways to read the same taxes
Switch views on the Taxes tab. Click any year to see its return beside the chart.
Income by bracket
How full each bracket is every year, with your bracket-fill target drawn as a line, so the years that spill past it are easy to spot.
Income by source
What fills each return: wages, then withdrawals and Roth conversions, then Social Security and RMDs, measured against your deduction.
Tax rates
Your effective rate against your marginal rate, year by year: what you pay on average, and what the next dollar costs.
A strong foundation, propelled by community...
From real estate and ACA optimization to Roth conversions and the Bucket Strategy - explore everything FIREproof can model.
Draw down your portfolio with Guyton-Klinger, VPW, CAPE, or Hebeler autopilot, all backtested against 150 years of market history. See every strategy.
NEW Pro
Tax Strategy Explorer
Compare Roth conversion and 72(t) strategies the way they would actually have played out. Not one average-return projection: every strategy in the results runs your whole plan through every historical start year, and How it holds up draws each one as a bar, worst to best, showing how much better or worse it ended than your current plan. Averages hide the losers. This shows you every one.
- Failures avoided and introduced. See which market histories a strategy rescues, and which ones it breaks.
- Your limits are hard limits. A cash reserve, a yearly tax cap, which accounts pay the tax, which accounts stay untouched. Every strategy tested respects them, and none is relaxed to make a result fit.
- Two baselines. Your current plan and no conversions at all, pinned and labeled at the top of every comparison.
- Choose what "better" means. Make the plan last, leave more after tax, or pay less tax. A lower-tax plan never wins by running out of money.
- Your heirs' tax, in the open. Ending wealth before and after heir tax side by side, and which strategy wins at other heir tax rates.
- Monte Carlo, checked twice. Strategies are chosen on one batch of simulated paths and scored on a second batch the search never saw.
TIPS Bond Ladder/Tent
Each rung pays a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted amount in a specific year, so you fund the first part of retirement from maturing bonds instead of selling stocks into a downturn. Protect yourself from sequence-of-returns risk, then let your equities ride.
ACA Healthcare & Premium Tax Credits
Auto-lookup marketplace premiums by ZIP. Project your subsidy each year and optimize withdrawals to maximize the Premium Tax Credit. Auto-ends at Medicare age.
Roth Conversion Optimizer
Manual or optimizer-mode Roth conversions. See bracket room, model the 5-year rule, and compare lifetime tax with and without conversions.
Bucket Strategy
A market-aware three-bucket withdrawal strategy. Pauses growth-bucket sales during bear markets, refills aggressively in good ones.
Real Estate Modeling
Model homes you own and homes you'll buy. Track mortgages year-by-year, project appreciation, plan a future purchase, run rental cash flow with depreciation, and even model a 1031 exchange.
Withdrawal Strategies
Choose how each year's spending is sourced, then see the reasoning explained year by year.
- Sequence-risk defense. When the market falls far from its peak, spending shifts to the accounts you mark as safe, so a downturn early in retirement never forces you to sell stocks at a loss.
- Rebalance via withdrawal. Spend from whichever asset class has drifted overweight. Your withdrawals do the rebalancing, so year-end trades realize fewer capital gains.
- Guyton-Klinger. Classic guardrails: spending rises after good years and cuts back when your withdrawal rate drifts too high, with decision rules backtested against history.
- Risk-Based Guardrails. Each year's spending is solved against a target chance of success, so you always know how much you can safely spend given the markets you have actually lived through.
- VPW. Variable Percentage Withdrawal spends an age-based percentage that rises each year, deliberately drawing the portfolio down over your lifetime so you enjoy your money instead of leaving it behind.
Try It - No Account Needed
Explore the full simulator with a pre-built scenario. Same engine, same charts. Tweak retirement age, spending, and allocation in real time.
See it in action
Pick any year of any history and see what happened. The year sits beside the chart, so you can step through a bad history the way you would have lived it.
"One of my favorite simulators is cFIREsim.com"
"The tool that you've built here is absolutely fantastic, really well researched, and tons of great data. Thank you so much for building it."
"We for sure nerded out for hours on cFIREsim for our first WPF Long Weekend retreat."
"If there was a list of heroes of the financial independence movement, I'd advocate for Lauren Boland being on that list... Lauren developed cFIREsim, one of the more powerful and popular retirement calculators among members of the FIRE community."
