Hey Everybody! I’m Vincent. I am so passionate about this topic. I don’t know why? Maybe because deep in my heart, I want to be free. I believe in Freedom. Freedom of speech, Freedom to do your Hobbies and the Freedom to be who you want to be. When I started looking at my own retirement arc I became impassioned because now I had hope. I had hope to a new beginning that was never taught to me.
We are taught to go to school, go to college, get a job…blah blah blah. I think it was a big PsyOP. A pattern and social engineering project to keep us in the industrial era but most importantly, obedient.
Well, for me, retirement planning whether it’s this blog, doing videos or writing code to do it, is my next step of the plan. I call it my OUT. Not retirement in the traditional sense — not a rocking chair, not a golf course. Just the freedom to wake up and choose what I do with my day. The freedom that Morgan Housel calls “the highest form of wealth.”
Getting to your OUT requires answering one terrifying question: Will my money last? How will I know?
You’d think with all the apps and advisors out there, that answer would be easy to find. It isn’t. Most retirement tools fall into two camps. You either pay a subscription that feels like a second mortgage, or you use some free calculator that hands you a single “you’re fine” without showing its work. I couldn’t stomach either. I wanted something transparent, powerful, and free — a tool that treated retirement planning like the deeply personal, uncertain, and hopeful thing it actually is.
So I built it.
AiRA is named after my sister-in-law Aera — a quiet tribute to someone who mattered. In this journey, what I found and love is the philosophy of planning. Very soon you realize that Family and Health are super important and supplants anything else that is really just noise. You should try it! It’s liberating and a wonderful method of self reflection, self actuation and self realization. So…
Enter AiRA Freedom Financial
AiRA isn’t a black-box algorithm. It’s an open-source retirement forecaster that runs 3,000 Monte Carlo simulations on your actual portfolio, using real historical stock and bond returns, to show you the full range of possible futures — not just one rosy number someone wants you to believe.
It models taxes, healthcare shocks, rental income, Social Security, and even your spending smile — because as Blanchett and Morningstar have shown, we don’t spend the same amount every year in retirement. It gives you a fan chart of 10th-to-90th-percentile outcomes. It includes Guyton-Klinger guardrails — withdrawal strategies that adapt to what the market is actually doing, just like a real retiree would behave. And it lets you model two households, two tax situations, a spouse in a high-tax state while you retire abroad, because life is complicated and your tool should be too.
I built it for me. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized: everyone deserves this.
Why Free?
I’m a disciple of JL Collins and Morgan Housel. Collins taught me that the Simple Path to Wealth doesn’t require a financial advisor skimming 1% a year off the top. Housel taught me that the most important part of any plan is your ability to stick with it — and complexity is the enemy of that.
Both of them shaped how I think about money. And both of them would tell you that a tool that helps you see your financial future clearly — without selling you anything — is worth more than one that charges you for the privilege of being optimistic about your numbers.
So AiRA is completely free. No subscriptions. No premium tier. No locked features. Run as many scenarios as you want, change every assumption, import your portfolio, export your results — all without touching your credit card.
There’s a “Buy Me a Coffee” button. That’s it. If it helps you sleep better at night, and you feel like saying thanks, that’s the whole business model. If not — use it anyway. The code is on GitHub. Fork it, improve it, make it yours. I just ask that if you do change the code, that you put it back to me so I can “fix” things that are important. Help me pay it forward!
What Makes It Different
I’ve looked at the alternatives. Many of them are excellent. Here’s what AiRA does differently:
Full transparency. Every line of code is open source. You can see exactly how the simulation works, what assumptions are baked in, and modify it yourself. You can’t do that with a proprietary tool.
No conflicts of interest. I’m not trying to sell you an annuity or a managed portfolio. There’s nothing to buy. The tool just shows you the numbers — good or bad — and lets you decide what to do with them.
It models real life. Healthcare shocks in your 70s. Rental income that isn’t 100% reliable. A spouse in a high-tax state while you spend winters abroad. Kids in college during your early retirement years affecting your tax strategy. These aren’t edge cases in AiRA. They’re built in.
It’s yours forever. No vendor can pull the plug or change the pricing. The code exists. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, anyone can pick it up and keep going.
How It Got Built
I’m not a coder by trade. I’m a technologist who loves tinkering and who had a very personal reason to solve this problem. I had two AI collaborators who did the heavy lifting on the React code, the Monte Carlo engine, the tax math, and the endless UI refinements: AiRA-Claude (Anthropic’s Claude) and AiRA-DeepSeek. I was the product manager, the tester, the guy who kept saying “no, that input still loses focus when I type a number.”
What came out the other side is something I’m genuinely proud of — a tool I’ll use for the next 25-30 years of my own financial life, and that I hope changes how you think about yours.
Plan Your OUT
Here’s what I want you to take from this:
Your OUT is possible. It probably doesn’t require as much money as you think. It definitely doesn’t require a financial advisor charging you 1% a year to tell you things you could figure out yourself with the right tool. And it doesn’t require you to stay in a job you hate one day longer than the math demands.
AiRA shows you the math. Clearly. Honestly. For free.
Find it at aira.tiredtoretire.com or in the header where there is a hyperlink. Import your portfolio, play with the sliders, run the simulation, and see what your financial future actually looks like — not the version someone is trying to sell you.
The code is on GitHub. Fork it, break it, improve it. That’s the beauty of open source. https://github.com/axwack/Aira_Monte_Carlo
And if it helps you find your OUT — even a few months sooner than you thought possible — that’s worth more to me than any coffee.
Here’s to retiring on your own terms.
—Vincent Lee April 25, 2026