Since yesterday afternoon I am seriously confused. This is due to my lack of using Excel and not being an accountant.
The issue is that I want to early retire in a self financed way, until DH will receive our pensions at the age of 67. So we don't need the 25 x spending level to last for the rest of our lives, but need to covers approx 20 years.
Because I had no idea how much we needed to FIRE, I made this big excel sheet. The first page contains parameters with tax brackes that I can change when the system changes. The next pages are a detailed calculation per year of how much stash we have, the 4% we can take out, the extra income we might have, the income tax to pay, the tax on stash, the tax on stock profits. And then the yearly income we want to reach. The goal is to find out how much we need to start with.
The fact is that when I opened the spreadshett yesterday, I needed 7,5 mil Norwegian crowns to FIRE in 2020. I looked better into some of the fomulas that I had used and find out I was using brutto income instead of nett income. So I corrected the formula. I got some dependency errors, because the height of the safe withdrawl amount depends on how much additional income we might have. Therefore the tax on the withdrawl amount is dependent on the withdrawl amount. Excel protested loudly and I solved it by paying the tax in the year after, just to get it working.
But the issue is that when I was finished with the formulas and had copied it to the pages up to 2030, the FIRE number increased to 9,5 mil! That would mean three years of extra work, at least.
Because I had faith in my new formulas, I copied the columns on to the other pages up to 1941 which is the last one. These had obviously not been updated for some time. While I was copying, the FIRE amount reduced all the way down to 5 mil! Which is something we have today as soon as we downsize.
As you understand I am slightly desperate. I need help with that sheet. I will again try to motivate DH to look at it in detail. He is better in Excel than I am. He is not an accountant either, but an engineer and generally good at math. I hope we will figure it out together.
I am also wondering whether I would benefit from hiring an economic expert to look at it. I am affraid that suck a person also would need to spend several hours on it and might charge 5000 crowns or more for such a job. But it would be benefitial to have someone confirming my calculations. Let's hope DH can igure it out.