About
Built by the people who lived this.
fjordFIRE was built in Norway, around a single question: how much freedom your money actually buys for your life. Especially when your income, savings, and family obligations refuse to fit one currency or one country.
The question we asked first
fjordFIRE started because we wanted to answer one question for ourselves before we could answer it for anyone else: how much freedom had the money we saved actually bought us? Enough for a break? Enough to move, or to carry us if life changed shape?
The spreadsheet we kept wasn’t a budget. It was a way of understanding our own lives. Updating it once a quarter was the work; the answer it produced was peace of mind. fjordFIRE is that work, made repeatable.
How this started
We’re a small team of expats in Oslo, Norway, with fifteen-plus years each building secure, scaling products for European and global markets. fjordFIRE started as our own household spreadsheet: Norwegian salaries, families in other countries, money trying to live in three currencies at once. It got messy enough that building the real version felt easier than maintaining the spreadsheet. That’s what you’re looking at.
Who’s behind it
Between us we’ve earned, saved, and sent money home across India, England, Australia, and Norway. It was our own problem before it was a product.
Why this exists
Most personal-finance apps assume a single-country, single-currency life. YNAB is great if you live in one place; Monarch and Empower expect a US bank to plug into; spreadsheets work but only until your life gets more than two currencies and a couple of cross-border accounts. The moment that boundary breaks, everything starts to lie: net worth drifts on stale FX rates, savings rate flatters or punishes you for things you didn’t do, the “6 months of expenses” emergency-fund rule has no idea you pay rent in NOK and send INR home every month.
fjordFIRE is the version that keeps the awkward parts visible. Once a month you enter your own numbers, and it shows you where your money actually stands rather than drowning it in every transaction. It focuses on the few figures that move your FI date: four pillars instead of a single net-worth number, FX pulled apart so you can see it, per-member math for couples whose lives cross borders. It’s the math you’d already be doing across five spreadsheets, in one place.
What we don’t do
- We don’t read your bank. Manual entry only. We don’t plug into Plaid, Tink, Open Banking, or any aggregator. Your credentials stay with your bank, not with us.
- We don’t sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone calling themselves a “partner.”
- We don’t train AI on your data. The in-app AI runs on a European model (Mistral), and our data-processing agreement with them excludes your conversations from training. They’re deleted after 30 days. It’s off by default, and off in settings any time.
- We don’t delete your data without telling you. Step away for up to three years and nothing is touched. After that we email you, and only remove the account if we hear nothing for 60 days.
What you can do here today
fjordFIRE is open to everyone. The math behind it is on this site too, and so is how it works:
- Seven free calculators: FIRE number, Coast FI, emergency fund, relocation runway, currency conversion cost, FX-aware savings rate, Norway exit tax. All using the same formulas fjordFIRE runs.
- Six in-depth lessons: the 4% rule, FX attribution, FIRE for couples, the FIRE spectrum, cost-of-living arbitrage, multi-currency basics. Same material we teach inside fjordFIRE.
- Blog: long-form writing on the parts of personal-finance math other planners skip.
- Method: how the numbers are made. Monte Carlo, FX attribution, cost-of-living data, a full change history. Explicit about what’s modelled, approximated, and out of scope.
- Trust & Privacy: privacy as architecture, the four lines we don’t cross, and the security stack named in plain terms.
- Compare: head-to-head against ProjectionLab, Cfiresim, Monarch, and a really good spreadsheet, including where they’re better.
- Changelog: what we’ve shipped since December 2025. Real dates, real commits, including the boring fixes.
Why it’s free
fjordFIRE is funded out of pocket and non-commercial. We built it for our own household first, and we run it with no investors to grow for, no ads to serve, and nothing to upsell. Everyone gets the whole product. If that ever changes, you’ll read about it here first, and nothing gets charged without you agreeing to it.
Where we are going
For a few months, a handful of households used fjordFIRE with real money across different currencies. Their feedback was direct and generous, and it shaped what we build next. It is open to everyone now.
We’re not going to buy ads. If the math is right and the writing is useful, people will find it.
Open to everyone, free.
Open fjordFIRE