Early-Retirement.org Acquires FIRECalc

[Andy R]

This past week FIRECalc was acquired by Early-Retirement.org. For those of you who don't know the history here, FIRECalc was developed by Dory36, the founder of Early-Retirement.org. He reached out to me about passing the torch and I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to put these two resource back under the same umbrella.

This will allow members to save portfolio information and run scenarios as needed. It will also bring new members to E-R.org since anyone running scenarios over there will have to sign up here to save them. We will also cross promote the sites hoping to bring more attention to E-R.org on FIRECalc.

Beyond the login integration of the two sites we will also look at how we can make the work flow of FIRECalc more obvious for newbies. For people who have never used it, it can be hard to recognize that each tab has inputs for more variables to use in the modeling. I think it would be nice to find a way to make that more logical. A basic look/feel updated would give it a fresh look as well.

We will update the data each year with the previous years numbers so the application will stay up-to-date. Since the logic behind the application is 10 years old (and well tested) there are no plans to make any changes on the back end logic that powers the results at this time.

If you have any ideas on how to make FIRECalc better, please let us know.

 

[ERD50]

A while back (6 months? a year?) it seemed like I could not access firecalc, and a google sent me to "fireseeker.com". Since I'm not entering passwords or anything, I went ahead and used it, figuring it was just a hosting/server change on Dory's end. I see it now re-directs to firecalc.

Was this just part of the transition?

-ERD50

 

[Andy R]

ERD50, Originally the site was hosted on Fireseeker.com. As time passed Dory36 moved it to FIRECalc.com but since there were lots of links back to FireSeeker.com he setup the server so multiple domains could run from the same set of code. They were all identical just on different domain names.

All these domain name was a big confusing so I have redirected all of them to FIRECalc.com. FIRECalc is a trademarked phrase and the "brand" that we want to promote. We don't want to confuse people by having the site on multiple domains. As you pointed out, if they go to FireSeeker.com they will be redirected to FIRECalc.com.

Search Engines (namely Google) have issues with what they call duplicate content. One of their biggest challenges is keeping content scraper sites out of their search results. Over the years, a tactic used to get more listings in the search engines was to put the same content on multiple domains hoping to get them all listed in the results. Google does not like this practice and suggests your site could be penalized for this. This is another reason why we 301 redirected the other domains to the primary domain. This will tell the search engines the site has been moved permanently to the new domain.

 

[chemist]

I have a suggestion, or maybe a question. It seems that if you tick any of the boxes under the "Investigate" tab, you are permanently locked in to the investigate function - no way to leave all radio buttons on that tab unticked. Maybe I am missing something but it would be nice to be able to "untick" this page.

 

[REWahoo]

chemist, maybe I'm misunderstanding your question/issue. What information are you requesting to see by leaving all buttons unticked?

The default (first) selection on the Investigate tab gives the basic FIRECalc output - number of cycles that failed, success percentage, etc. The other options allow you to see the impact of various changes. The program doesn't know what to display unless you make a selection - or leave the default in place.

 

[chemist]

Thanks REWahoo you have answered my question! I misread the first option as only giving the spreadsheet output.

 

[TorC]

FIRECalc Results Graph Distortion

Not sure this is the right thread to report this on, but I want to share some unusual behavior I've noticed on the results screen over the past few days, on two different computers and networks. I've searched the forum, but I don't see any reference to this. Here's an image of what I see:

 

[Janet H]

Thanks for the report - we'll check it out.

 

[Rich_by_the_Bay]

Note that some of us have contributed small amounts ($15 in my case) to the cause once in a while, and this would buy us the right to use customizable income modeling which I found handy. For example, I could enter a certain income for the first 3 years, then drop it out at year 4. Nice when you ESR and have some temporary income but not intended to last forever.

But mostly we contributed in appreciation to Dory.

 

[Danny]

Note that some of us have contributed small amounts ($15 in my case) to the cause once in a while,...But mostly we contributed in appreciation to Dory.

Amen brother. $115 from me. I think he named part of a disk drive after me. Forgot to take it off my taxes...

 

[jIMOh]

My only suggestion is to add some accumulation variables to the financial calculator.

Firecalc is one of the two draw down calculators I rely on

However I have not found any calculator to work on accumulation (changing saving rates, getting mortgage paid off, market performance on both, taxable vs tax defferred vs tax free).

If inputs or a tab or two can be added on accumulation, I think it would help those of us 10-20 years away from retirement.