Free calculator

How much do you need to stop working early?

Fill in what you spend, when you want to stop, and what you expect from AOW and pension. You get the amount, the date, and the split between the years you bridge yourself and the years after your state pension starts.

01What you spend
02When you stop
03What comes in after
04Your assumption

What you need

Fill in the fields above and your target appears here.

The method

How this is calculated

Two sums, both standard present-value formulas. Nothing is simulated and nothing is random.

The bridge.

Between the age you stop and your AOW age you fund everything yourself. That is an ordinary annuity: the present value of your annual spending over that number of years, at your real return.

The supplement.

From your AOW date onward, AOW and pension cover part of your spending. Only the remainder has to be funded, and it has to last indefinitely, so it is a perpetuity: the annual gap divided by your return, discounted back to the day you stop.

Both use a real return, so every amount on this page is in today's money. There is no inflation figure to enter and no inflated number to interpret.

Empty on purpose

Why AOW and pension start empty

Your AOW build-up depends on where you lived. You build 2% per year over fifty years, and every year outside the Netherlands costs 2%, so someone who worked abroad for five years gets 90%. That is not a rare case among the people who look up a calculator like this. The amount also differs depending on whether you live alone or with a partner, and it is adjusted twice a year, which is why a figure ten or twenty years out is not something anyone can fill in for you.

The same goes for the return. Gylder does not suggest a rate, because a pre-filled number carries weight no matter what the caption next to it says. Enter your own, and run it more than once: the spread between 3% and 5% tells you more about your plan than any single answer does.

Scope

What this does not do

Stated plainly, because the articles that link here state it too.

Questions

What is FIRE?
Financial Independence, Retire Early: building enough capital that work becomes optional. The number on this page is that capital, worked out for someone with a Dutch AOW and pension rather than for the American version of the same idea.
Why is my number lower than 25 times my spending?
Because the rule of 25 assumes you fund every year yourself, forever. In the Netherlands, AOW and any occupational pension take over part of your spending from your AOW date onward. Only what is left has to come from your own capital, and that is a smaller number.
What return should I enter?
That is your assumption rather than ours, which is why the field starts empty. The useful part is running it at more than one value. If the answer moves a lot between 3% and 5%, your plan leans on the return more than you may want it to.
How do I get the spending figure right?
Use what you actually spent over the past twelve months, including holidays, insurance and the costs that only come round once a year. The most common mistake in this calculation is a monthly figure multiplied by twelve, which leaves out exactly the costs that are easiest to forget.

Keep reading

The calculator is one part of it. The rest is knowing what you actually own and what you actually spend, which is what Gylder does the rest of the year.