Tools, books, and the rare podcast worth your hour.
Financial Tools
- SuicideFIRE Calculator — coming soon. Input: portfolio, spend rate, honest horizon. Output: probability of running out, terminal value distribution, the year your math starts to wobble.
- cFIREsim (cfiresim.com) — the gold standard for historical-data retirement simulation. Set “retirement length” to 15 or 20 years, not 40, and watch the numbers change.
- Engaging-Data’s Retirement Calculator (engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early) — Monte Carlo, very tweakable.
- Portfolio Visualizer (portfoliovisualizer.com) — for backtesting allocations.
- NewRetirement (boldin.com) — strong on taxes and drawdown sequencing.
Recommended Reading
On money
- Bill Perkins — Die With Zero
- JL Collins — The Simple Path to Wealth
- William Bengen — Conserving Client Portfolios During Retirement (the original 4% paper, 1994)
- Wade Pfau — Safety-First Retirement Planning
- Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez — Your Money or Your Life
On mortality and meaning
- Seneca — On the Shortness of Life / Letters from a Stoic
- Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
- Atul Gawande — Being Mortal
- Bronnie Ware — The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
- Oliver Burkeman — Four Thousand Weeks
- Ernest Becker — The Denial of Death
- Derek Parfit — Reasons and Persons
On living
- Henry David Thoreau — Walden
- Annie Dillard — Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Mary Oliver — Devotions
- Pico Iyer — The Art of Stillness
Podcasts and Videos
- The Mad Fientist — back catalogue is gold for FI fundamentals
- ChooseFI — community-flavored, useful if you want to hear other people’s math
- Afford Anything (Paula Pant) — best on the trade-offs FIRE forums won’t discuss
- Philosophize This! — accessible philosophy, including good episodes on Stoicism and existentialism
- The School of Life — short essays on death, meaning, and time
Where to argue
Comments are open on each essay. For longer disputes:
- Email — Contact page
- Reddit —
r/financialindependence,r/leanfire,r/coastFIRE(we lurk)
If something belongs on this list and isn’t here, tell us.