About PortfolioAtlas

PortfolioAtlas answers one simple question: "If I retire with $X, what kind of life can I actually live?" We break it down city by city, dollar by dollar.

About Me

Hi, I'm Chris.

I'm a software engineer who has spent my career building products used by millions of people. Along the way, I became fascinated with a different kind of engineering problem: designing a financial life that maximizes freedom instead of just income.

I followed a similar path as a lot of people reading this - I was jumping between dozens of spreadsheets, calculators, blog posts, and assumptions that rarely matched my own situation. Every tool I used answered some questions well but missed the bigger picture. My family and I are planning our own cross-border FIRE journey, so every number on this site is data I'm personally invested in.

With that in mind, I built PortfolioAtlas.

My goal is to create the retirement planning tool I always wished existed.

PortfolioAtlas is designed to help you answer questions like:

• When can I safely retire... and where?
• How does moving to a lower-cost city change my timeline?
• What happens if the market underperforms?

Good financial planning shouldn't require a finance degree. As an engineer, I believe the most important decisions in our lives should be transparent, data-driven, and easy to experiment with. Every assumption should be visible, every projection should be understandable, and every decision should help you gain confidence in your strategy.

Outside of work, I'm a husband, father of two, lifelong tinkerer, and avid data lover. I enjoy building solutions that solve real problems, whether that's new apps for my wife's dinner parties, side projects for my kids, or the occasional blend of homemade wine.

If PortfolioAtlas helps you make one better financial decision or retire with a little more confidence than before, then it has accomplished what I hoped it would.

Thanks for visiting, and I hope the tools here help you build a future you're excited to live.

How We Calculate

We estimate each city's costs across three lifestyle tiers. The familiar 4% rule (the "Trinity Study" benchmark - spending × 25) is shown only as a reference number. Whether a city counts as "you can retire here" is decided by the historical backtest below, not the rule.

For each lifestyle tier, we research and estimate realistic monthly costs for housing, groceries, dining out, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, utilities, and - at higher tiers - domestic help and luxury extras. Those costs feed both the 4% rule benchmark and the historical backtest that produces the verdict.

A note on housing: these numbers are rents. Every housing figure is the market rent for the home described. We never assume you own property. If you'd own your home outright, subtract the housing line and your target drops a lot. If you'd buy with a mortgage, compare your full monthly cost of owning (payment, taxes, insurance, upkeep) against our rent line. That's a reasonable swap, with one catch: the down payment comes out of the same portfolio you're testing.

The FIRE Score

Each city receives a FIRE Score from 1 to 10 based on a weighted combination of four quality-of-life factors: safety (30%), healthcare quality (30%), infrastructure (20%), and expat friendliness (20%). Cost of living is intentionally excluded as it's already addressed through the affordability filters and lifestyle tiers.

A higher score means a better quality of life for retirees. Cities like Singapore, Tokyo, and Amsterdam score highest thanks to excellent safety, world-class healthcare, and strong infrastructure. The FIRE Score helps you answer: "If I can afford this city, how good is it to actually live there?"

How the retire verdict works

Whether a city says "You can retire here" is decided by a historical backtest, not a rule of thumb. We take your actual plan - your portfolio, the selected lifestyle tier's annual cost, and your retirement horizon - and run it through every historical period of that length since 1871, using real US market returns from Robert Shiller's dataset (1871–2022). The portfolio is a 75% stock / 25% bond mix rebalanced once a year, and each year we raise the withdrawal for that period's actual inflation.

The result is a survival rate: the share of those historical periods in which the plan never ran out of money. It is a percentage, not a yes or no.

We turn that survival rate into a plain verdict, against the confidence level you pick (default Balanced, 90%):

• "You can retire here": survived at or above your confidence level.
• "Close - worth a closer look": survived within 10 points below it.
• "Not quite yet": survived lower than that.

The homepage map is binary: a city shows green when it clears the same confidence line. The middle "Close" band appears only on the city page.

You still see the 4% rule benchmark because it is the number most people know, but it is only a sizing shortcut: it assumes roughly 30 years and leaving your principal intact forever. The headline figure, "Needed to retire here", is instead solved from the backtest - the portfolio that actually reaches your confidence level over your retirement length - so it always agrees with the verdict.

Two controls under "Your assumptions" shape this. Confidence level (Aggressive 80% / Balanced 90% / Conservative 95%) sets the bar for both the verdict and the target. Retirement length sets how long each backtested period runs.

A few honest limits:

• It is based on US market history. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
• The allocation is a fixed 75% stocks and 25% bonds. Cost estimates are for a one-person household by default - the household-size control under "Your assumptions" scales them per category for two adults.
• We do not model moving mid-retirement. Each city's number assumes you stay there. The gap between two cities' survival rates is itself the value of geographic flexibility, which you can see by comparing them rather than us simulating it.

Important Disclaimers

The cost data on PortfolioAtlas is researched and estimated for informational purposes only. Actual costs vary based on personal lifestyle choices, exchange rate fluctuations, inflation, and individual circumstances.

This site does not provide financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with qualified professionals - a financial advisor, tax specialist, and immigration attorney - before making any relocation or retirement decisions.

Cost data reflects approximate values as of early 2026 and will be periodically reviewed.