Questions

Two things at once. It compounds what you've already invested plus what you add each month, and separately works out how much each of 32 cities would cost you to live in. The answer is the age at which the first number catches the second — for every city, not just one.

That's the whole point. Financial independence isn't a single date; it arrives roughly a decade apart depending on where you plan to be standing.

Two kinds of figures are fetched from real sources. Exchange rates refresh daily from a public rates API, and life expectancy comes from the World Bank — male and female, latest published year, per the country your currency implies. Both live in the site's own database and arrive with an "as of" date; a baked-in snapshot covers total failure, and Taiwan stays hand-estimated because the World Bank doesn't publish it.

Everything else was written by hand by the author — informed estimates, not retrieved from any dataset. That varies in reliability. Population, temperatures and climate classifications are well-documented facts. Cost of living is an estimate, and it's the number that drives every result — each city's popup shows the date its figures were last hand-checked. The safety, English, internet and transport scores are coarse judgements on a 0–100 scale; real published indices exist for several of them, but they were not used, so the car-free score is not a Walk Score despite resembling one.

Visa and tax entries are the most perishable thing here. Thailand's remittance rules changed in 2024, Portugal's NHR regime closed to new entrants, and Indonesia's treatment of foreign income has moved more than once. Treat them as a prompt to go and check, never as an answer.

The honest summary: the ranking between cities is far more trustworthy than any individual number's apparent precision.

Sex and currency together pick a life expectancy, and that sets the age your money has to last until. A longer life needs a bigger pot, so it raises every target and pushes retirement slightly later.

Currency stands in for country, which is rough — the euro alone covers twenty countries spanning about nine years of male life expectancy. The country actually being assumed is named under the selector so you can see whether it fits you. Average is the default and splits the two, so nothing is assumed before you choose.

Two things argue for dragging that age higher than the figure offered. It's life expectancy at birth, and having already reached your current age means you've survived the years that pull that number down. And about half of people outlive their life expectancy — planning exactly to it is close to a coin flip.

Because most people do, and it's a far more achievable target. Funding yourself forever on investment returns alone — never touching the capital — needs substantially more than funding yourself to a specific age and finishing at zero.

Untick Spend it all and the model switches to the perpetual version, using your withdrawal rate instead of the age. On the default numbers that moves the cheapest target from roughly $240k to $345k.

Real plans usually sit between the two, since nobody wants to hit zero on schedule. The gap between the two figures is a fair picture of what outliving your plan would cost.

In spend-down mode it's the present value of the remaining spending — everything you'll need from retiring until the plan-until age, discounted at your real return. Because the horizon shrinks as retirement approaches while your savings grow, the two cross exactly once, and that crossing is solved numerically.

In perpetual mode it's simply annual cost divided by your withdrawal rate — the 4% rule, where 4% implies 25 times your annual spending.

Returns are real, meaning after inflation, and all costs are in today's money. That's why no inflation adjustment appears anywhere else.

No, and it can't. Every city converts at the same rate, so switching currency moves all the figures together and leaves their order untouched. Only the absolute numbers change.

Your inputs are held internally in dollars and converted purely for display, so switching back and forth never quietly alters what you typed.

Walkability, public transport and cycling averaged into one 0–100 number, so you can filter for places where you wouldn't need a car. Set it to 70 and Bali, Dubai and Austin disappear quickly.

It's three rough judgements averaged — useful for filtering, not a measurement. Each city's popup breaks out the three components and describes what getting around is actually like there, which is more informative than the score.

It assumes you become tax resident where you land and pay local tax on your withdrawals, raising each city's target by its local rate. That genuinely reshuffles the order: Georgia, Malaysia, the UAE and Singapore take nothing from foreign investment income, while Portugal and Germany take a lot.

It's off by default because plenty of long-term nomads never become tax resident anywhere on the list. It also treats the entire withdrawal as taxable, which overstates it — in most systems only the gain is taxed, so reality sits between the two figures.

Anywhere you could never afford on your current numbers is left off, since it has no retirement age to plot. It still appears in the table marked never.

Beyond that, the continent, temperature and car-free filters remove cities from both the chart and the table. The head-to-head comparison deliberately ignores your filters, so comparing against home keeps working even after you've filtered home out.

No. Every calculation runs in your browser, and your figures are saved only in your own browser's local storage. Nothing you enter is transmitted, and there's no account, no analytics and no database.

The page does make two kinds of outbound request, neither carrying your inputs: exchange rates from a public rates API, and Google AdSense, which serves the ads and sets cookies as any ad network does.

The list is 32 cities picked to span the range — from Goa at $1,150 a month to New York at $5,500 — with each entry researched by hand rather than pulled from a feed. That's what keeps it to 32 rather than 1,500.

The high-cost entries like New York, London and Singapore are there as benchmarks: most people's answer is more useful when they can see what staying put would have cost them.

No. It's a comparison tool, and it leaves out things that would matter to a real plan: currency risk when your portfolio and your spending are in different currencies, healthcare costs as you age, the cost of moving and visa runs, and sequence-of-returns risk.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A constant real return is a convenient fiction — the order in which returns arrive during your first few years of retirement affects the outcome more than their average does. The sensitivity table gestures at this without properly modelling it.

Use it to compare destinations against each other. For anything you'd actually act on, particularly tax, talk to someone qualified in the country you're moving to.