Jia Hui

Personal project

Singapore FIRE Calculator

2025 → unfinished → working on it again

Old versionAll projects
The original Singapore FIRE Calculator, showing profile inputs for date of birth, target FIRE age, life expectancy, inflation rate and CPF LIFE plan, followed by the start of the liquid assets section.
The original version, still online.

Why it exists

Generic FIRE calculations don’t map perfectly onto Singapore. Most of the tools I came across assume a single pot of investable wealth that you draw down from the day you stop working.

That isn’t how wealth here is usually shaped. It tends to be distributed across:

  • cash
  • liquid investments
  • CPF
  • housing
  • future CPF LIFE income

Some of that is available immediately. Some of it is not available for decades.

Total wealth vs accessible capital

This is the distinction the calculator is built around.

Someone can have enough total net worth to look financially independent on paper, while holding too little accessible capital to bridge the years between early retirement and CPF becoming available. The plan works at 65 and fails at 45, which is exactly the part a generic calculator won’t tell you.

So the model has to answer two questions separately: do the numbers add up over a lifetime, and do they add up every single year until CPF starts paying out.

What the original version modelled

The first implementation already attempted to account for:

  • income and salary growth
  • CPF contributions and balances
  • CPF LIFE
  • liquid investments and investment returns
  • inflation
  • mortgages
  • recurring expenses
  • one-off expenses
  • retirement age
  • liquidity in the years before CPF becomes available

It works, roughly. It is also unfinished, under-tested, and not something I’d want to hand to someone else as-is.

On framing

To be clear about the history: this was not Singapore’s first FIRE calculator, and there were FIRE-related tools before it. What I did notice relatively early was that comprehensive, Singapore-native FIRE planning, particularly modelling CPF alongside liquid assets, wasn’t well served by the generic tools I was using at the time.

It isn’t trying to beat SG FIRE Planner or anything else that exists now. This is my own model of a problem I find interesting.

Why I’m finishing it

Four honest reasons, in order:

  1. I want it for myself.
  2. I want to finish an abandoned project.
  3. It’s a good engineering and product exercise.
  4. I’d like a useful version to stay available for free.

Possibly later

Ideas, not features. None of this exists yet:

  • better CPF modelling
  • a clearer view of liquid vs locked assets
  • year-by-year projections
  • CSV export
  • Excel export
  • possibly Google Sheets integration

CSV almost certainly comes before anything involving Google OAuth.