Ever ask yourself what are the best Financial Independence calculators and tools are available to assist you in achieving FI? After much searching we’ve narrowed down the most popular and useful Financial Independence Tools in existence.
Disclosure: This page may contain affiliate links where theFIway.com receives compensation of some sort if you decide to utilize the tool. Any benefits received do not influence our decision to post the link as these are tried and true tools that we consider of great value to achieving Financial Independence. These links solely provide us a means to keep generating free content.
Best Financial Independence Tools
A huge labor of love was to develop a way to identify a target financial independence date for a real person and to see if savings will last for a lifetime. Many of the online calculators don’t include planned events, various expense reductions, owning a car for longer than the loan amount, expense ratios and fees, inflation, variable savings rates, etc. Developing a plan to FI with financial formulas is daunting and takes quite a bit of time, but we’ve done most of the work for you.
PC is one of the most robust tools to track investments, income, expenses and determine where your money is going. It’s great for budgeting, but even better for retirement planning. It’ll track your Net Worth, investment portfolio, fees, asset allocation, and run Monte Carlo simulations to predict the likelihood of retirement success.
Similar to Personal Capital, but with more focus on the budgeting and bill paying aspect of personal finance. Mint will also monitor your investments, credit score, provide savings advice and give you tools for debt management and budgets.
Finviz is your one stop shop for stock analysis. The Free sections of the site are relatively powerful and the UI is user friendly. Finviz makes excellent use of filters to segment the market and run comparisons. The information on each ticker contains just about every data point you can imagine as well as the latest news on the relevant company.
A series of free online applications to help households organize their finances by tracking budgets, net worth, asset allocations, and cash flow. Their features target the DIY investor that manually wants to evaluate their finances rather than trusting their account information to financial institutions with ulterior motives. Wealth Media also features a blog and other calculators related to Financial Independence and retirement planning.
As children get older, they’ll need additional methods to learn about managing money and get accustom to proper credit card use. FamZoo utilizes prepaid cards and a family finance app for virtual banking designed to teach teens about earning, saving, and spending wisely. Parents define the rules, automate allowances, chore rewards, penalties for missed work, interest on savings, expense sharing, contribution matches, budgets, loans, and more.
RoosterMoney is by far the best app to teach young children about money in the chores and allowance ages. To see how it can be used, check out Kylven Ross’ 20 week challenge and review of his kids RoosterMoney pursuit to FI. The app can be set to truly demonstrate the power of compound interest in a way kids will understand.
Robert Kiyosaki’s Cash Flow board game teaches people how to build passive income and get out of the rat race. You will be presented with various opportunities each turn. It’s a fun way to learn how to evaluate real estate and stock purchases while dealing with debt and the curveballs life presents. It’s more of a conceptual learning experience rather than what you would likely do in the real world.
Best Financial Independence Calculators
Obviously you save different amounts as a kid than as an adult. You also invest more as an executive than an entry level employee. Most compound interest calculators don’t take that into consideration. theFIway.com has created a fully customizable spreadsheet to help you predict what your total assets could be based on various monthly savings during a specified time period.
This tool answers the question of how long money will last in retirement if the market does no worse than the great depression taking into account expenses, savings rate, life expectancy, inflation assumptions and income.
FireCalc provides insights as to how much you need to ensure your investment portfolio lasts based on data dating back to the 1800s. You’ll get a sense of the risk to your financial independence or retirement plan in every market condition the world has ever faced.
This calculator takes input of your annual income, savings rate, expenses and compiles estimates on how many years it will take you to achieve financial independence or early retirement in various countries.
The choice between buying a home and renting is among the biggest financial decisions that many adults make. But the costs of buying are more varied and complicated than for renting, making it hard to tell which is a better deal. To help you answer this question, the NY Times calculator takes the most important costs associated with buying a house and computes the equivalent monthly rent.
Backtest your investments and asset allocations with Portfolio Visualizer. This online tool allows you to construct one or more portfolios based on selected investments and backtest portfolio annual and rolling returns. The results include a visualization of the portfolio growth chart, adjusts for inflation, and can include periodic contributions or withdrawals.
