The arithmetic of financial independence is not complicated, and none of it is secret. Most people who would benefit from it never meet it in a form they can use. This page sets out what the ideas here are built on, and exactly what this is not.
The four percent withdrawal rate comes from published work, not from me. William Bengen tested historical American market data in 1994 and found that a portfolio drawn down at roughly four percent a year had survived every thirty-year period he examined. The Trinity Study, published by three finance professors at Trinity University in 1998, tested the same question across different portfolio mixes and reached broadly similar conclusions. That is where the number in the calculator comes from.
I want to be careful about how much weight that carries. It is a rule of thumb built largely on twentieth-century American returns. Serious people argue for lower figures, and they have good reasons. It is a planning convention: useful for getting a rough position onto paper in two minutes, and not a guarantee of anything.
The rest is plainer still. Compound interest is arithmetic, and it behaves the same way whether it is working for you or against you. The observation that the time it takes to reach independence depends far more on the proportion of your income you keep than on the size of that income is the central insight of the financial independence movement, and it follows directly from the same arithmetic. Property has long been treated as a hedge against inflation because a long fixed-rate debt is repaid in currency worth less each year; that is a mechanism, not a promise. Depreciation is measurable. So is the difference between what an asset produces and what a possession costs to keep.
None of this is proprietary and none of it is mine. It is public, it is free, and most of it has been in print for thirty years. You can verify every calculation on this site by hand in about ten minutes, and I would rather you did.
The gap here is not a gap in information. The arithmetic has been freely available for decades. The gap is that almost nobody runs it.
Good advice is expensive, and the men who most need to see their own position are rarely the ones who can pay for an hour of a professional's time. Most of what fills the space instead sells speed, because speed is what performs. Very little of it asks you to sit down with twelve months of statements and produce two honest numbers.
This was built to close a small part of that gap. Not to replace a professional, and not to deceive anyone: to put the arithmetic in front of a man in a form he will actually work through, and to be plain about who is speaking while it happens.
There is no man named Edmond Favre. The name, the voice, the face on this site and on social media: all of it is a deliberately designed persona. Not a real watchmaker, not a real author, and not a stand-in for either.
The ideas are real and the arithmetic is real. What the persona changes is how they are carried. A textbook is rarely finished and a spreadsheet is rarely opened, while the same idea in the voice of a man who has already made the mistake tends to land. That is a deliberate choice about delivery, made openly, on a page you can reach from everywhere else on this site.
Edmond Favre is not a financial advisor, and nothing here is financial advice. Nobody involved in this site holds a licence or authorisation to give it, in any jurisdiction. What is here is general education and one point of view, and you are free to reject it.
For anything involving your actual money, speak to a licensed financial advisor, ideally one acting as a fiduciary, which means they are obliged to act in your interest rather than sell you a product. They will know your tax position, your obligations, and your circumstances. I do not, and no calculator can.
That is not a disclaimer buried in fine print. It is the first rule this project was built around.
Run the number, or read what the book is for.
Not ready for either? The calculator is free, takes about two minutes, and asks nothing of you until the end.