Best free Die With Zero calculators, compared

Yes — several free Die With Zero calculators exist beyond zeroleft now, and a few are genuinely capable. Here's what each one actually does, where they overlap with zeroleft, and the one thing none of them attempt: weighing an experience's value against the health you're likely to have when you get to it.

The calculators built specifically for this

Retirement Scenario's Die With Zero calculator is the closest in spirit to zeroleft's own solver: free, no signup, and it runs a Monte Carlo simulation across the same engine as its full app to find the monthly amount you can safely spend without running out. Retiro does something similar and adds a direct side-by-side with Traditional FIRE and the 4% rule, using the same inputs for all three, so you can see how the Die With Zero number compares to the number a preserve-principal plan would give you. Stratos Tools runs a more straightforward spend-down projection: raise your target spending, lower your life expectancy, and watch the portfolio path move until it depletes at the horizon you choose. Project Financially Free's calculator offers a Simple and an Advanced tab — the simple version gives a quick portfolio-size-and-withdrawal answer, the advanced one takes more assumptions. jpuncompiled's tool is a smaller, independently built net-worth projection calculator aimed at the same question. All five are free to use without an account.

Boldin is a different kind of entry: not a purpose-built Die With Zero calculator, but a full retirement planner (formerly NewRetirement) with a free tier that includes Monte Carlo analysis and scenario planning, and a $120/year PlannerPlus tier for account syncing and more advanced scenarios. Its Die With Zero page shows you how to configure the general planner to model the book's spend-down goal rather than handing you a single-purpose calculator — closer to ProjectionLab's general-planner approach than to the dedicated tools above.

If what you actually want is a spreadsheet you can see every formula in, rather than a web calculator, we cover the free spreadsheet options — including Money Flamingo's downloadable Die With Zero sheet and the shared Google Sheets template — separately rather than repeating that ground here.

Monte Carlo isn't the differentiator it used to be

It's worth saying plainly: Boldin's free tier, Retirement Scenario and Retiro all run a market-path simulation now, same as zeroleft. A calculator that gives you one number from one assumed return, with no sense of how many market paths would actually get you there, is increasingly the exception among the tools above rather than the rule. If a stress-tested number were the only thing on offer, none of these tools would clearly beat each other.

What none of them do: weigh a trip against your health

Every calculator above — zeroleft included — answers a version of "how much can I spend." None of the others place a specific, named experience into a point in your life and ask whether your health will still let you enjoy it when you get there. That's not a spending question; it's the other half of the die-with-zero method — the book's push to front-load experiences while you can still carry them — and it needs a different kind of model.

zeroleft's time buckets do this by holding an enjoyment-ability curve alongside your finances. Take the hike-the-Camino trip in zeroleft's own sample plan: a physically demanding, multi-week trip that needs reasonable fitness (the model requires health at or above 0.75 of its baseline for a full-value experience). Planned at 62, it scores 5.58 on zeroleft's lifetime-value index — the immediate enjoyment plus the memory dividend it pays back in recollection every year after. Delay the same trip to 70 and the model's own health curve has fallen enough that the value drops 52%. Push it to 80 and it's down 87%. By 90 there's almost nothing left of it — down 98% from the value at 62. None of the figures are currency; they're an index for comparing timing against itself. But the direction is the real point a spending calculator can't show you: waiting on a physically demanding trip has a cost that a flat withdrawal number doesn't capture, and it compounds faster than most people expect.

The same logic applies to gift timing — the book's suggested window of ages 26–35 for giving to children, where the money can still change a decision rather than just topping up their own retirement account later. It's a timing question, not a spending-number question, and it's absent from every calculator compared above.

Which to use

If the only question is "what's my safe spending number," Retirement Scenario or Retiro are capable free options with a real stress test behind them, and Boldin's free tier can get you there inside a broader planner if you're willing to configure it. If you want that number plus a floor kept back automatically, gifts and experiences checked against the book's own timing windows, and a health-weighted view of when a trip is still worth taking, that's what zeroleft adds. Start with the free no-login estimator for a rough number in under a minute, then move to the full planner for the survival-threshold floor, the Monte Carlo run, and the time buckets.

zeroleft is a planning aid, not financial advice, and has no tax model. It's an independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Bill Perkins, the publisher, or any of the tools named above.