The real expat FIRE number: what 25× misses

How much do you need to retire abroad? Start with 25 times a year's spending, then add destination costs, healthcare, taxes, the cost of moving, later pensions, and a longer horizon.

How much do you need to retire abroad? The usual answer is tidy: take what you spend in a year and multiply by 25. It is a good starting point. But 25 times is just the arithmetic. The twist, for a cross-border household, is that the number misses less than you would think and the parts it does miss are not the ones people expect. Healthcare and taxes are not add-ons to it; they live inside the spending you multiply. What genuinely sits outside are the income that arrives later, the one-off cost of the move itself, and whether 4% even fits a long retirement. Here is what actually goes into the number.

25 times is the arithmetic, not the plan

Where does the 25 come from? It is the flip side of spending 4% of your savings in the first year: if year one costs about 4% of the pot, you need about 25 times a year’s spending to cover it. It is a genuinely useful way to turn a vague “enough” into a figure to aim at. But be clear on what the multiplication does and does not cover. It does not leave out healthcare, or taxes, or the country you move to. Those are ongoing costs, and ongoing costs go into the yearly spending you multiply. What sits outside the arithmetic is narrower: the one-off cost of moving, income that starts later, and whether 4% is even the right rate. That 4% came from US markets and US inflation over roughly 30-year retirements, not from a life that crosses currencies and tax systems.

So the real work is not patching the formula. It is getting four things right around it: your yearly spending, the one-off costs, the income that starts later, and the withdrawal rate.

First, get the spending number right

The multiple is only as good as the spending you feed it, and for a cross-border life that number is genuinely hard to pin down. Two things need pulling apart. First, place: your spending is set by where you will actually live, not where you are now, so today’s Oslo budget is the wrong input for a life in Valencia. The relocation runway calculator re-estimates it using country-level World Bank price data, a rough picture of your basket rather than a promise about your exact rent and groceries. Second, currency: the number needs a currency, so use the main one your future life will be priced in, and keep any lasting spending in other currencies on its own line rather than blended in.

Healthcare is a real line, not a footnote

The next two, healthcare and taxes, belong inside that spending figure, not on top of it. They are ongoing costs, so they go into the yearly number you multiply. Healthcare is one of the hardest costs to carry across a border, because both the price and the system can change when you move. What it costs you at 50 can look very different at 70, whether you qualify for a public system depends on the country and your status, and late-life care is a different problem again. A cash cushion can absorb the odd out-of-pocket shock, but it does not solve ongoing cover, eligibility, or long-term care, which need their own thinking. fjordFIRE does not model those, and we will not pretend to. It is a real line in the plan, and it deserves proper thought rather than rounding your spending up and hoping.

Taxes follow you across the border

Your savings have to cover both what you actually spend and any tax needed to produce that money. For a cross-border household that is rarely one clean country: tax can land where you live and where a pension, dividend, or rental income comes from, with treaty rules sorting out how the two fit together. You do not need a perfect tax forecast for a first pass, but you do need an honest assumption, and you cannot assume one country quietly takes care of it. fjordFIRE does not model your personal tax position, so it leaves that as a line you fill in, not a number it makes up.

Then the costs that sit outside the number

That was everything that lives inside the spending figure. The rest sits outside it. Some costs do not belong in yearly spending at all, because they happen once: the move itself, the paperwork and residency costs around it, and in some countries an exit tax. Leaving Norway can trigger tax on gains you have not even cashed in yet, when your tax residence ends. That is a one-off, not a yearly cost, and under the current rules you can pay it immediately, spread it interest-free over twelve years, or defer it for twelve years with interest, so it need not land as a single first-year bill. It still belongs in the plan. The exit-tax calculator sizes the Norwegian version, and the exit-tax post walks through how the charge works.

And the income that arrives later

Twenty-five times today’s spending assumes your savings carry the whole bill for the entire retirement. Often they do not. State pensions, workplace pensions, and other later-life income can take over part of the spending once they start, and someone who has worked in more than one country may have several of them. Your savings may only need to bridge the years before those payments begin, then top up whatever gap is left. That does not make the pension money available early, and a pension you cannot touch yet is its own problem. But counted properly, later income can meaningfully shrink the pot you need, while leaving the bridge before it intact.

Then test the rate against how long you’ll live off it

Retire early and your money may need to last forty or fifty years, not thirty. The 4% rule was tested against a roughly 30-year retirement, so a long one is a reason to check whether 4% is too high for your plan, not to assume 25 times is automatically enough. A longer horizon may call for a lower starting rate, which means a bigger multiple, or a more flexible rule that trims spending after bad years rather than trusting one figure to hold for half a century. Put it all together and the honest number is a range you manage, not a line you cross once.

How fjordFIRE counts it

fjordFIRE builds the number in the currency you choose, prices it against cost-of-living data for where you plan to live, folds in the exchange rate and, for Norway, the exit tax, and treats locked pensions as later income rather than money you have now. It does not price your healthcare or your personal tax position. The point is not to make the number look more precise. It is to make the assumptions visible: what is modelled, what is a rough estimate, and what still sits outside the sum, the same split the method page spells out.

Read next: You hit your number. Which currency do you spend from? · Why single-currency FIRE calculators give expats the wrong number.

Companion tools: FIRE Number calculator · Relocation Runway calculator.

Common questions