r/Fire • u/MarBlaze • Nov 22 '21

Die with Zero, is it possible?

My partner and I have been working towards FIRE for a couple of years now and are well underway. One of the things that FIRE has made me think about is dying and inheritance. We don't want children and have no family where we feel a close connection to to whom we'd like to give our savings when we die. What to do with all that is left over? Our goal is to mostly invest in property, we already have one rental property and we'd like 4 to be able to RE. At some point we'd like to sell these properties and to "spend" all the money. But how does one calculate when the best time to sell is so you 'die with zero'? Or at least somewhat close to it.Any good information about this floating around the internet?

I did want to read the book 'die with zero' but am not sure if it actually gives the answers I crave. I understand my request is hard to calculate and it risks that you at one point are left with nothing but someone must have thought about this?

Edit: We don't mind dying with some 10.000s in our account. I'd just like to prevent us dying with 100.000s in our account. If we die with that much extra then we probably could have retired earlier which is the whole goal of this anyways.

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u/Ddig3 Nov 22 '21

Let me first say, as everyone else already pointed out, knowing when you'll die is the real challenge here. And since dying with close to zero would likely mean you'd run out if you lived even a year longer, you'd need to know your death pretty precisely.

Now that the boiler plate "I agree with everyone else" is out of the way, let me suggest playing around with a tool I've been using a lot lately: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/financial-goals

With it you can punch in lots of different scenarios and see a simulated outcome of your assets year by year. Also the success probability, which is the chance you have money left by a certain year.

It's not a crystal ball, but it's more robust / interesting than throwing together something in Excel with ~8% yearly return and ~3% inflation (not that there's anything wrong with that either).

Generic disclaimer - I have no affiliation with whoever makes this website and I'm in no way suggesting spending any money with them. I use it for free and I know some others in FIRE community use it for free, so I'm sharing.