Your FIRE Spreadsheet Doesn't Work When Your Assets Live in Three Countries
My spreadsheet started as a list. What do I own. What is it worth.
Then a second column: what did I pay, against what is it worth now. That column was uncomfortable. Some assets hadn't performed at all, and they were still generating tax obligations every year. So I started pruning.
Then the questions changed. We wanted to renovate. Which account do I draw from? Which one earns the least interest? Which one costs the most to move? Each question added a tab. I've lived in India, China, France and now Basel, and the accounts followed me in the sense that I never closed most of them.
The spreadsheet kept growing because the questions kept coming. But it was always dead. A snapshot, accurate on the day I updated it, and only as good as what I remembered to put in.
Then I tried to answer the question every early-retirement spreadsheet exists to answer: when is it enough? That is where it broke.
The 4% Rule Is One Country's History
The safe withdrawal rate behind most FIRE planning comes from William Bengen's 1994 paper in the Journal of Financial Planning and the Trinity study that followed it. Both used US stock and bond returns from 1926 onward, for a retiree spending US dollars and paying US tax. Under those conditions, 4% a year survived every thirty-year period in the data.
In 2010, Wade Pfau ran the same test on the market histories of seventeen developed countries. Even on optimistic assumptions, 4% survived the worst historical period in only four of them: the United States, Canada, Sweden and Denmark. A portfolio split evenly between stocks and bonds would have failed at some point in all seventeen. The US was one of the best cases in the sample.
What that means for a household like mine
Treat 4% as the best case. If you spend in euros or francs and part of your wealth is in rupees, start your planning below it. The research behind the number never covered a household whose spending currency and asset currency are different.
Where It Breaks: Currency
The rupee has roughly halved against the euro since the euro was launched. A rupee asset can grow handsomely in rupees and very little in the currency you buy groceries with. A FIRE model needs one currency of account. For most of us in Europe that is the currency of the life we will actually retire into, and every Indian asset in the model needs a conversion assumption that is as important as its return assumption.
Where It Breaks: Tax on Withdrawal
A single-country model applies one tax rate to withdrawals. A three-country household pays a different cost on each account, set by where you live when you draw, not where the account sits. The Netherlands taxes the holding through Box 3 whether you withdraw or not. Switzerland charges cantonal wealth tax on it every year. Germany taxes the gain when you sell. India taxes Indian-source gains of non-residents at source. The order in which you draw down your accounts is not a detail of the plan. It is most of the plan.
Where It Breaks: Money That Can't Move Freely
Some of the assets in the spreadsheet aren't available on the terms the spreadsheet assumes. Indian property takes months to sell and its proceeds leave India within an annual repatriation limit. NRO balances are subject to the same limit. EPF interest is set each year by notification. A pension in a country you've left pays out on that country's schedule, at that country's retirement age. A model that treats all of this as one liquid pot will tell you you're done years before you are.
Where It Breaks: Which Country You Retire In
Every number above depends on one assumption the spreadsheet never states: where you will live when you stop working. Healthcare, cost of living, which state pensions you can claim and how your pensions are taxed all follow from it. If that question is open, the plan is quietly answering it for you. That is its own post: you're probably planning for the wrong retirement country.
The Spreadsheet Isn't the Problem
The FIRE framework is sound. The withdrawal research is some of the most careful work in personal finance. It was built for one currency, one tax system and one country, and a household that lives across three has to rebuild it rather than borrow it.
The deeper problem is the one I hit long before I asked when it would be enough. A spreadsheet only knows what you remember to tell it, on the day you tell it. A cross-border financial life changes in three places at once: rules, rates, accounts that go dormant, exemptions that quietly end. The model goes stale faster than you update it.
Do you know which account you'd draw from first, and what it would cost you in tax where you live?
A blog post can tell you the rule. It can't tell you what it means for your accounts, your dates, your numbers. That's a conversation, not a search result.
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