FIRE progress tracking template
A FIRE tracker needs five numbers a month: the date, your total invested, your net worth, your take-home income, and your spending. Everything people usually add — savings rate, percentage of target, projected date — is calculated from those five, so recording them separately only creates a second thing that can be wrong.
Update income and spending monthly, while you still remember the month. Quarterly is enough for the invested total: checking it more often mostly measures market noise.
The template
Paste this into any spreadsheet. The first five columns are what you type; the last two are formulas.
Month | Invested | Net worth | Take-home | Spending | Saved | Savings rate 2026-01 | 85,000 | 97,400 | 5,200 | 3,100 | =D2-E2 | =F2/D2 2026-02 | 88,600 | 101,050 | 5,200 | 3,450 | =D3-E3 | =F3/D3 2026-03 | 87,900 | 100,700 | 6,100 | 3,050 | =D4-E4 | =F4/D4
That is the whole thing. Resist adding columns for a few months — a tracker you actually fill in beats a comprehensive one you abandon in March.
What each column is for
| Column | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Month | Makes the row comparable. Use YYYY-MM so it sorts correctly everywhere. |
| Invested | The number your FIRE date is actually computed from — retirement accounts and brokerage holdings. Not your car, not your emergency fund. |
| Net worth | The wider picture, including property and debts. Useful context, but do not confuse it with the number above: a paid-off house does not fund groceries. |
| Take-home | What actually arrived, after tax and payroll deductions. Using gross income flatters your savings rate by exactly the amount you never received. |
| Spending | What left. The single most decision-relevant number you record, because it sets your target as well as your rate. |
How often to actually update it
The honest cadence is not the same for every column, and pretending otherwise is why trackers get abandoned:
- Monthly — income and spending. These are reconstructions, and their accuracy decays fast. Fifteen minutes at the start of a month, for the month just finished.
- Quarterly — invested total and net worth. Often enough to catch a real trend, rare enough that you are not reacting to a fortnight of noise.
- Yearly — the assumptions. Expected return, retirement spending, target age. These should change rarely and deliberately, not in response to a bad quarter.
Reading it without fooling yourself
Three readings do most of the work:
- Savings rate trend, not level. One low month means little; three falling months is a signal. This is the column you control most directly.
- Contributions versus market movement. Subtract what you added from the change in the invested total. What remains is the market, and it is not a verdict on your habits. A quarter where you saved well and the balance fell is a good quarter, badly disguised.
- Spending against the retirement figure you are planning for. If your actual spending has drifted 20% above the number your FIRE target assumes, the target is wrong — and that matters more than any return assumption, because it moves both the goal and the rate at once.
The trap worth naming: a tracker measures the past, and it is easy to let a good row stand in for a plan. Recording six months of solid savings tells you nothing about whether the money would survive thirty years of withdrawals — that needs a projection with the returns arriving in different orders, not a spreadsheet of what already happened.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
Spreadsheets are excellent at recording and poor at projecting. The point where people usually move on is when they want to ask questions the sheet cannot answer: what a career break does to the date, how much a house purchase costs in years, whether the plan survives a bad first decade, or what happens if they retire two years earlier.
Ember keeps the same five-number habit — a monthly check-in — and adds the projection to it, so the numbers you record are compared against the plan they were supposed to produce.
Keep the habit, get the projection
Record your monthly check-ins and see them against your plan line. Free, and no sign-up needed to start.
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