Thinking of chucking it all and retiring early, long before you start getting a pension or Social Security, and before you have ready access to your 401k and IRA? This calculator will help you figure out whether you are set up to do it.

To gauge your strategy's likely success, FIRECalc looks at investment returns since 1871. But the calculator doesn't use average historical rates of return. Instead, it analyzes what would have happened if you retired in 1871, in 1872, in 1873 and so on. It then calculates how often your strategy would have panned out historically. So you can see the impact of say retiring in the 1929 when the Stock Market crashed. The theory is if you can withstand that type of financial disaster, you can make it through almost anything. I have found this to be a very flexible planning tool.