I stopped obsessing over early retirement and started asking: “When can I go part-time?”
I realized I don’t actually hate working. I just don’t want my entire life tied to a full-time engineering schedule forever.
So instead of focusing purely on “retire at 40” numbers, I started thinking more about a transition phase where investments reduce the pressure enough that I can work lower-stress or part-time jobs I’d actually enjoy.
I built a calculator to model that scenario:
- investment growth over time
- inflation-adjusted expenses
- stopping full-time income at a chosen age
- adding part-time income later
- seeing how long the portfolio survives
You can play with sliders and the graph updates live.
I hosted it here using a free site if anyone wants to mess with it:
https://v0-part-time-retirement.vercel.app/
it's a first go at it so I know it can be improved, let me know what you think.
I'm not trying to make any money or sign up people to anything! I'm just sharing this cool tool I made and hope people enjoy it and give me good feedback!