Why this exists

Most retirement calculators make you choose between simple and useful

Somewhere along the way, retirement and FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) calculators split into two camps, and neither one is great.

• The one-number tools. Type in a few fields, get back a single output — "you can retire at 47" or "your number is $1.8M." No chart, no year-by-year detail, no sense of what actually happens to the money after that headline number. You have to trust the answer, because you can't see the work.
• The spreadsheet-grade tools. Historical cycle testing, Monte Carlo settings, dozens of configuration options before you see a single result. Powerful, but they're built for people who already understand sequence-of-returns risk and withdrawal methodologies — not for a quick gut-check on a Tuesday night.

And a lot of the more polished-looking tools bury the actual calculator behind an email address or a "create a free account" wall before you can see your own numbers.

What The Long Coast does instead

The calculator on the home page is built around a few rules that don't change no matter how many features get added later:

• Instant. No submit button. Every field and slider updates the chart and the table live, so you can feel the shape of the outcome as you drag, not just read a number after you hit calculate.
• Visual first. The center of the page is a chart of your entire trajectory — not a single output. You can see the shape of compounding on the way up and the shape of drawdown on the way down, on the same line.
• The full lifecycle, not half of it. Most tools do accumulation ("can you reach your number") or withdrawal ("will the 4% rule survive 30 years"), but not both stitched together. This one runs your money from today, through your working years, through retirement, out to age 100 — in one continuous projection.
• Transparent. The table underneath the chart shows the numbers behind it — your balance, that year's contributions or spending, and your withdrawal rate at every milestone and event — so nothing is a black box.
• No account, no email, no gate. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. See the privacy page for the specifics.

Who it's for

People already familiar with Coast FI, FIRE, or the 4% rule who want a faster, more visual way to stress-test a scenario — "what if I spend $10K more a year," "what if I retire three years later," "what if returns are only 5% instead of 7%" — and want to see the answer as a full 60-year trajectory, not a single sentence.

Who built this

For a long time I didn't know what numbers I should actually be using. How much is enough? What return is realistic? When could I ease off? I've spent years researching retirement planning, and along the way I ran my own numbers through a handful of retirement calculators. Every one of them handed back a single verdict and stopped there.

What I wanted was one place that brought it all together simply and clearly — not just "you're fine," but what my money would really look like decades out, and how much room I had to adjust. The Long Coast is that tool, and I use it to plan my own future: to see when I could stop contributing, or how I could step my contributions down between now and retirement. I built it for anyone else asking the same questions.

I'm not a financial advisor. I'm a software engineer who has spent a long time studying this, and everything here is meant to help you understand your own numbers — not to tell you what to do with them.

How this site is paid for

Right now, The Long Coast doesn't make any money. There are no sponsors, affiliate links, or paid placements. I plan to add a "Buy Me a Coffee" button, and I'm looking into ads in the future to help cover hosting costs. If either of those changes how the site handles your data, the privacy page will be updated before it goes live.

Your data

I don't collect or store any of your data. There are no accounts, no cookies, and no analytics, and the numbers you type into the calculator never leave your browser.

Get in touch

Questions, bug reports, or ideas: thelongcoastretirement@gmail.com.