Mine is $844,800.
I didn't choose it. I can't negotiate with it. It's an output of two numbers, one of which I control completely, and it took about nine seconds to calculate once I actually knew my spending.
That last clause is where everyone falls down.
The Arithmetic Is Insultingly Simple
Annual expenses × 25. That's it.
The 25 comes from inverting a 4% withdrawal rate — if you can sustainably pull 4% of a portfolio per year, then 1 ÷ 0.04 = 25 years of expenses is the pile you need. The rate itself comes from the Trinity study and decades of argument since, and reasonable people put it between 3% and 4.5% depending on how pessimistic they are about sequence risk and how long the money has to last.
Here's mine, worked all the way through:
- Fixed monthly floor: $2,601
- Plus Claude Code Max (real business expense): $215
- Total monthly burn: $2,816
- Annual burn: $33,792
- × 25 = $844,800
Against total assets of roughly $390,000, I'm at 46%.
At a more conservative 3.5% withdrawal rate the target becomes ~$965,000 and I'm at ~40%. At 4.5% it's ~$751,000 and I'm at ~52%. The rate you pick moves the finish line by roughly $200k, which is worth knowing before you treat any single figure as gospel.
The Denominator Is The Lever Nobody Pulls
Look at the formula again. Two inputs: what you spend, and what you've saved.
Everyone optimizes the second one. Better returns, higher savings rate, side income. All real, all slow, all partly outside your control — the market does what it does.
The first one is entirely yours, and it moves the target itself.
Every $100/month you permanently remove from your burn drops your freedom number by $30,000.
$100 × 12 = $1,200/year × 25 = $30,000 less capital you ever need to accumulate. Forever. That's not a saving — it's a reduction in the size of the mountain.
Run it on something real. The $103.42/month subscription stack I killed wasn't a $1,241/year win. It was a $31,026 reduction in my freedom number — roughly a year of aggressive saving, achieved by cancelling things in an afternoon.
That's the asymmetry. Earning your way to $30,000 takes most people a year or more. Cutting $100/month takes a Saturday, and it counts the same.
Which is why the denominator lever is the first thing I reach for and the last thing most FI content talks about, because "cancel stuff" doesn't sell a course.
Why Nobody Computes Their Number
It isn't the math. The math is one multiplication.
It's that the input is a number most people genuinely don't have. Ask someone their annual expenses and you'll get an estimate that's off by 30%, usually low, because the estimate is built from the bills they remember rather than the money that actually left.
And once you have the number, you can't un-have it. You now know exactly how far away you are, and "someday" turns into a figure with a percentage next to it. For a lot of people that percentage is uncomfortable enough that not knowing it is doing real emotional work.
I'd rather have the uncomfortable number. 46% is a lot less frightening than the shapeless dread of not knowing, and it's the only version you can actually act on.
What The Number Doesn't Tell You
Two honest caveats, because a single figure invites overconfidence.
It says nothing about access. 78% of my assets are in retirement accounts I can't touch before 59½. So I could theoretically hit $844,800 and still be unable to fund the gap years. The freedom number tells you whether you have enough; it says nothing about when you can reach it. That's a separate problem and for me it's the harder one.
It assumes your spending stays put. Healthcare, kids, a parent who needs help, a mortgage that ends — all of these move the burn, and the target moves 25× as hard. The number is a snapshot, not a contract.
Neither of those makes it useless. They make it a starting point rather than an answer, which is what every good metric is.
Three Numbers, Ten Minutes
Go get these:
- Your real annual expenses. Not estimated. Pull twelve months of statements and total what actually left. It will be higher than you guessed.
- Multiply by 25. That's your number.
- Divide your invested assets by it. That's your percentage.
Ten minutes. And unlike almost every other financial exercise, the result is actionable in both directions — you can grow the numerator or shrink the denominator, and shrinking is faster at the start.
The Coast FI calculator takes the same annual expenses and withdrawal rate and tells you what you'd need invested today to coast to that number without adding another dollar.
Freedom is a math problem. This is the equation. Most people never write it down, then spend thirty years solving for the wrong variable.
Mine is $844,800 and I'm about 46% of the way there.
What's yours?