Funding & drawdown

On Planning → Assumptions, pick a withdrawal basis:

• Standard safe withdrawal rate — the classic perpetual-withdrawal approach: Ember sizes your required pot so a fixed percentage of it, drawn every year, is expected to last indefinitely without running the pot down to zero.
• Custom safe withdrawal rate — the same idea with your own chosen rate in place of the default, for a more conservative or more aggressive plan.
• Drawdown to zero — instead of preserving the pot forever, Ember sizes it to deplete to zero by a target end age (typically your life expectancy). This usually needs a smaller pot than a perpetual rate, so the FIRE date it implies is often earlier — but it leaves nothing behind.
• Planned withdrawal — you specify a fixed monthly amount to draw from the portfolio instead of Ember deriving one from your spend target. This overrides the spend target for FIRE-date purposes, so it needs to be set high enough to cover what your pensions and any rental or other income don't.

You can also add a drawdown-to-zero figure as a secondary, display-only target alongside your main withdrawal basis — a second FIRE age answering "when could I retire if I spent the pot all the way down?", without changing your primary plan.

If your planned retirement age is earlier than the age your pensions start paying out, there's a gap your portfolio alone has to cover — the "bridge". Turning on the pension bridge overlay in Assumptions has Ember work out how many years that bridge lasts and how much extra pot it needs on top of your ordinary required pot, then shows the bridge years and the remaining portfolio once pension income kicks in.

Many defined-contribution pensions let you take part of the pot as a one-off tax-free lump sum when you start drawing it, with the remainder taxed as income (subject to a lifetime cap that varies by jurisdiction). On Pensions, you can choose how a UK-style DC pot is accessed — take the tax-free portion up front alongside ordinary drawdown, or phase it gradually alongside each taxable withdrawal — and Ember reflects your choice in the projection. The exact allowance and tax treatment are jurisdiction data, kept current in Ember's versioned tax rules rather than hard-coded here.

Alongside the withdrawal basis you choose, Ember can also work out the maximum draw your actual projected pot could sustain given your assumptions — a sense check on whether your chosen basis is comfortably inside what the numbers support, or cutting it close. You'll see this reflected in the dashboard's FIRE-date maths and its ⓘ Explain trace, which shows exactly how the sustainable figure was derived from your pot, returns, and time horizon.

Planning → Funding breaks retirement down year by year: how much of your spend is covered by pensions phasing in, rental or business income, and how much is left for the portfolio to draw. Early retirement years — before pensions have started — typically lean heavily on the portfolio; later years lean less as other income ramps up. The page is organised into stages that mirror your residency timeline, so a change in country or spend shows up as its own card.

The dashboard's FIRE Journey chart shows the same underlying pot trajectory in miniature — your projected pot from today, through retirement, descending to your life expectancy, with markers for the one-off events (a sale, a purchase, an inheritance) that reshape it along the way. Both views draw on the same calculation, so the numbers never disagree.