Getting started — your first 30 minutes

Registration asks for a username, email, password, and a country dialling code. That country choice matters beyond the phone field — Ember uses it to set your account’s starting base currency, the currency every headline figure (net worth, required pot, FIRE date) is shown in by default. You can hold and track assets in other currencies too — the base currency is just the one everything rolls up into.

After submitting the form you’ll get an email to confirm your address before you can sign in.

Two-factor authentication (TOTP, via an authenticator app) is mandatory on every Ember account — this is a live SaaS holding real financial data, not an optional add-on. On first sign-in you’ll be asked to scan a QR code with an authenticator app (any standard one — 1Password, Aegis, Google Authenticator all work) and enter the 6-digit code it produces. You’ll then be shown a set of one-time backup codes — save them somewhere safe, since each one only works once and they aren’t shown again. After this step you land on the dashboard.

Every new account starts pre-populated with a small set of sample entries — a home, a mortgage, an investment fund, a pension, and some everyday cash flow — so the dashboard, the charts, and the FIRE number all have something to show on your very first look, rather than a wall of empty states. A banner on the dashboard reminds you this is sample data while it’s still present.

When you’re ready to switch to your own numbers, click Remove sample data on that banner — it deletes every sample row in one action and the banner disappears for good. Nothing about your own entries is affected either way.

A short setup wizard collects the handful of facts every projection depends on: date of birth, life expectancy assumption, target retirement age, tax residency, base currency, your annual spending target, and the default growth-rate, inflation, and safe-withdrawal-rate assumptions used across every scenario. A banner on the dashboard links back here until it’s completed — you can always revisit these on the Profile page later.

Head to Assets and add something real — a cash account, an investment holding, a property, whatever you actually own. Each asset is tagged by type and by whether it counts toward your SWR-eligible pot (a home doesn’t; a brokerage account does) — see the dashboard guide for why that split matters. If you hold accounts at a supported broker or exchange, the Integrations page can sync a balance automatically instead of manual entry — see the connection guides in the sidebar.

Back on the dashboard, the headline is your projected financial-independence date and the pot required to get there, computed from your current assets, contributions, and spending target. Every figure it depends on updates live as you edit assets, pensions, debts, and planned events — there’s no separate “recalculate” step.