Last Updated on December 19, 2021
“FU Money” represents the amount required for a person to stop being employed. She is then free to follow her passion and wait for it to generate an income without having to worry about expenses for at least a few years. Or the corpus could be large enough to generate an inflation-protected income for the rest of her life.
For those who may not know, FU is way of, er .. saying “goodbye” to your employer. U the FU stands for You and the F stands for one of the most popular expletives 🙂
Of course, every retirement calculator is an FU Money calculator. They tell you the corpus required. I have extended this a bit to offer two outputs:
1: If you were to retire today, how long will your current holdings last?
For example, if your current age is 40 and the answer to this question is:
10 years –> You can consider quit being employed and start a new venture on your own. You can wait for it gain traction in a few years without stress.
30 years —> Then the corpus could last you for next 25-30 years. You are almost financially free. If you hang in there for just a little while, this number could become a lot more robust.
2: If you were to retire as intended (normal retirement, say age 60), and made no further investments towards retirement, how long the money will last after (normal) retirement.
Suppose your age is 40, normal retirement is 60 and the answer to this question is:
10 years –> You will be financially independent in retirement for only 60+10 = 70 years. Not good enough. You need to continue investing for retirement.
25 years –> Then you will be financial independent for 60+ 25 ~ up to age 85. Pretty good. This means that if your current holding (fixed income, equity) grow as expected, it will produce a coprus that is good enough until age 85.
You can,
either continue investing for retirement with an aim to retire earlier or
lower the investment amount* or
even take a chance and stop investing for retirement*
* excercise caution please.
I hope that gives you a picture of what the FU Money Calculator does.
Here is a screentshot:
The last two outputs are the ones discussed above.
An android app based on this is in the works. Will publish that later.
Weblink to FU Money Calculator
Download the FU Money Calculator (excel sheet)
As always, I am open to feedback. Let me know how this can be modified. If you are using my mutual fund goal tracker, you will realise that these calculations are already there 🙂 They are also part of the Monthly Financial Tracker.
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