My new obsession for planning FIRE in Sweden: ProjectionLab

I have found a new toy! On one of the various FIRE podcasts I listen to while cleaning, I caught a commercial for a digital FIRE planning tool called Projection Lab and decided to explore. It turns out my spreadsheet-loving brain fell a little in love and I've now spent far too many hours making financial plans for the future.

ProjectionLab is a financial planning tool where I can create and simulate long-term financial plans. The program is perfect for those of us who want to achieve financial freedom (FIRE) or prepare for early retirement. It allows me to make detailed scenarios in the future, based on factors such as income, expenses, investments and taxes. This is especially useful for me aiming for FIRE in Sweden, as it becomes easy to optimize strategies to reach financial freedom faster. ProjectionLab is visual and interactive, making it easy to see how different decisions can affect the economy over time. I experiment wildly with different savings levels, and withdrawal strategies to see what works best. Less fun for my partner who has to hear me exclaim “Do you realize how much money we would save if [some financial insight here]”, as well as “I want to sell the house NOW!” more or less every night.

My family does not understand why I am so enamored with this tool but fellow FIRE geeks do.

A major advantage of ProjectionLab is that it takes into account important parameters such as taxes, returns, inflation and retirement income, which can provide a realistic picture of the future. By creating several scenarios, I can understand how different decisions affect our finances and gain control over planning. One downside is that all the presets are dollar and US based so I need to go in and tinker with everything to make it useful for Swedish tax conditions and the Swedish welfare system.

I will return to how I have done to adjust the settings in another post.