August 7, 2026·6 min read

Your pension doesn't count until you can touch it

A pension locked until 65 cannot pay the first years of an early retirement, though it can still make the plan work if liquid money bridges the gap. Cross-border lives add different unlock ages and tax. Here is how to count locked pensions separately so your FI date is honest.

A pension you cannot touch for twenty years cannot pay your first twenty years of retirement. It can still make early retirement work, if your liquid money carries the gap until it starts. Many simple FIRE calculators treat every account balance as equally available, and that is where the mistake starts. Cross-border lives widen the gap: a pot in one country, a scheme in another, each unlocking at a different age and each taxed differently when you draw it. For an honest date, count the money you can actually reach first, and put the locked part on a separate, later line.

Sort your money into two piles

Your net worth adds a brokerage account you could sell tomorrow and a pension locked until 65 into the same total. For a headline figure that is fine. For a retirement date it misleads you, because only one of those piles can carry you from the day you stop working.

So split them. The first pile is what you can draw on early: taxable investments, cash, anything with no access age in front of it. That pile sets your earliest possible stop date. The second pile unlocks later: workplace and personal pensions, national schemes, anything with a wall in front of it. That pile decides how comfortable the later years are, and it is the reason the first pile can be smaller than a naive 25× of your whole life.

The bridge is the real problem

Early retirement is a bridging problem. If you want to stop at 52 and your pensions open at 62, your liquid pile has ten years to cover on its own, after which the pensions start doing some of the work. How you treat those locked years is where the number goes wrong.

Worked example. You want to stop at 52. A workplace pension opens at 62, a state pension later still. Treat the pension as if you could spend it at 52 and the plan looks funded when it isn’t: the liquid pile drains around 60, with the pension still two years off. Ignore the pension entirely and you save for decades it was always going to cover. The honest version sizes the plan in two periods: what your liquid money must cover from 52 to 62, then the smaller portfolio draw the pension leaves after 62.

Across borders it gets worse

One person can hold a UK personal pension, an old US 401(k), a Norwegian occupational pension, and an Indian EPF balance. Each has its own access age, its own currency, and can be taxed differently when you draw it. Add them into one net-worth figure and you lose the thing that actually decides your date: when each part becomes spendable, and in what currency you will spend it.

Access ages are not universal, and they move. For most US 401(k)s, a withdrawal before 59½ can trigger an extra tax, though plan rules and exceptions matter, such as leaving your employer in the year you turn 55 or later. For most UK private pensions, the normal minimum age rises to 57 on 6 April 2028, with protected ages and other exceptions. Check the scheme rules and the tax position where you live before you draw.

How to handle it yourself

Sort your accounts into what you can draw on before your target stop age and what is locked until later. Only the first group sets your earliest date.
Give each pension its real access age, not an average. A pot that opens at 57 and one that opens at 67 are ten years apart in usefulness.
Convert each locked pension into the currency you will retire in, and test a few exchange-rate assumptions. You are looking for how much the plan moves, not a perfect forecast.
Treat a state or national pension as income that lowers the number you need later, not as a lump you can spend now.
Build the plan in two periods: liquid money covers the years to the first pension, then pension income and the remaining portfolio cover the years after.

How fjordFIRE counts it

fjordFIRE keeps this split in the FI view. Growth assets count straight away. A pension only joins that figure when its access age is at or before your target retirement age. Anything locked past that age shows as a separate “including pensions” total, so the main number reflects money you could retire on now. Pensions get their own pillar, Retire, with an access age, employer contributions, and a projected monthly income, so the later years are planned instead of assumed.

Each person in a household gets their own version of this, because two people rarely share one retirement age or one pension scheme.

Run it on your own numbers

The free FIRE Number calculator gives you a starting number in one currency. Inside fjordFIRE, the full FIRE engine keeps liquid growth and locked pensions on separate lines and dates each pension by the age you can actually reach it.

fjordFIRE opens free on 10 August. Add an access age to each pension and the FI view keeps the later-locked money separate.

Companion tool: FIRE Number calculator.