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.
Core Memento FIRE resources
These are the best starting resources if you want the practical side of the Memento FIRE philosophy.
- Start Here — the quickest orientation for new readers.
- The Memento FIRE Manifesto — the core philosophy: more life, not just more net worth.
- The Anti-Bucket List Worksheet — a practical exercise for subtracting obligations, spending, and roles that no longer serve your life.
- The FIRE Movement Has an Aliveness Problem — the flagship essay.
Use these before another calculator
Calculators are useful, but Memento FIRE starts one layer earlier: what are you trying to buy back with your money, and what does not actually need to wait?