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 year-by-year table underneath the chart shows exactly what's being calculated — balance, that year's spend, withdrawal rate, cumulative withdrawn — so nothing is a black box.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

I've always wondered what the "right number" actually was. I'd run my own numbers through a handful of retirement calculators over the years to get a sense of when I'd feel financially secure, and every one of them handed back a single verdict and stopped there. What I actually wanted was to see the whole shape of it — not just "you're fine," but what my money would really look like decades out, and how much room I had to push: spend more, retire later, aim higher. The Long Coast is the tool I wish I'd had for that, built for anyone else asking the same question.