Why this exists and how to get in touch

Retirement planning is dominated by two frames. The first is the traditional one: work for forty years, stop at sixty-five, live off what you saved. The second is the FIRE frame: save aggressively in your 20s and 30s, quit early, live off your investments forever. Different ages, same binary — you're either working or you're not.

Most people don't actually want either. They want to know when the money side of their life gets loose enough that work becomes a choice — not a stop date, an unlock date. The date the paycheck stops being the reason.

After it, work can look like anything: fewer hours, a different career, a nonprofit, a side project that pays nothing for three years, the sabbatical you keep putting off, or the same job you already have with the tension quietly gone. Project Optional exists to show you when that date is, and what changes it.

A financial planning tool for people who want to see the year work becomes optional, and model the decisions that move it. You enter your accounts, your contributions, and what you'd spend in a year you weren't working. The tool projects forward and hands back a single date — plus a lab where you can toggle life changes on and off and watch the date move.

The projections use the real-return method, which means every number is in today's dollars — no separate inflation slider, no made-up compounding rates that make the future look bigger than it is. The default 7% expected return is already inflation-adjusted; the 4% safe-withdrawal rate is the classic Trinity Study benchmark. Both are conservative starting points that you can change.

Every calculator on the public Resources library uses the same engine as the paid dashboard. The dashboard just remembers your numbers, loads them into every calculator, and lets you save and compare scenarios.

It isn't FIRE. FIRE optimizes for a specific outcome — retire in your 40s and never work again. Project Optional doesn't care whether you retire. It cares when the choice opens.

It isn't retirement planning in the traditional sense. It doesn't model Social Security, healthcare-in-retirement bridging, or required minimum distributions. The tool assumes you're pre-Optional and trying to see the runway ahead, not planning distributions from a 65-year-old portfolio.

It isn't financial advice. Project Optional is a modeling tool, and every projection is a straight-line estimate on top of assumptions you can change. It won't tell you what to do. It'll show you what the math does under different scenarios so you can decide with real numbers in front of you, and it links out to the methodology so nothing is a black box.

It isn't going to touch your bank. No brokerage sync, no Plaid, no aggregator with your credentials. Every number in your account was typed by you. That's a deliberate product choice — the tool is designed so that even the founder can't see your financial data, and neither can anyone else.

Feature direction is public on the Roadmap. Members get to vote on the ordering of what ships in 2026 — Monte Carlo, withdrawal tax modeling, Social Security bridging, and everything else the model doesn't yet do.

Have questions or want to talk about the app?

We're always reachable at hello@projectoptional.com or join the community here r/ProjectOptional.