FIRE planning for EU expats with US RSUs

Time: ~6 min. Need: rough numbers for your RSU vesting schedule and your EUR-base savings rate.

The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) math is clean when everything is in one currency. Spend in EUR, save in EUR, invest in EUR, retire in EUR — multiply annual expenses by 25, hit the number, stop working. EU expats with US-denominated Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) do not get the clean version. Your spend lives in EUR. Your largest single growth asset vests in USD on a quarterly clock you do not control. The arithmetic that closes the gap is the article.

The single-currency FIRE calculator runs the same loop every year: take this year's expenses, take your portfolio, take your assumed return, project forward, find the year your portfolio crosses 25× expenses.

For an EU expat with US RSUs, four things break that loop.

Your RSUs are not a contribution; they are a delivery. A FIRE calculator built for monthly savings expects you to "add" a fixed amount to the portfolio each month. RSUs do not behave that way. Vests happen quarterly, in tranches that depend on grant size and vest schedule. The portfolio jumps. The contribution schedule is irregular.

The currency mismatch is structural, not cosmetic. Your retirement target is in EUR — because rent, groceries, and the eventual move home are in EUR. Your portfolio is partly in USD — because the RSUs do not change currency on their own. A 10% USD weakening against EUR shifts your FIRE date by months without your portfolio losing a single dollar.

Withholding and tax dilute the vest. A portion of every RSU vest goes to tax withholding the moment it lands. What you can spend or invest is the after-tax remainder. Tools that count the gross vest as portfolio inflow overstate your progress.

The withdrawal rate has to be currency-aware. Standard 25× FIRE math assumes a stable purchasing-power currency. When your spending currency and your largest asset currency diverge, the safe withdrawal rate has to absorb that risk — which usually means a slightly more conservative multiple, or a portfolio-rebalancing rule that converts a portion of USD gains to EUR each year.

The calculator does the projection. You bring the inputs.

1. Your EUR-base annual expenses. Sum the last 12 months of rent, food, transport, holidays, and direct debits. Strip the one-off purchases. Round up by 5%. That is your spend baseline.
2. Your portfolio in native currencies, with the per-currency breakdown. The USD RSU pool, the EUR pension, the EUR brokerage account, any other asset class. WealthSense reads these directly from your accounts — but if you are still on a spreadsheet today, write them down by currency.
3. Your RSU vesting schedule for the next four years. Approximate is fine. The calculator needs the shape of the inflow, not exact grant numbers.

If you have those three, you have what you need.

The calculator runs the projection per currency and rolls up to your base.

• It models RSU vests as scheduled inflows, in USD. You enter the grant amounts and the vest dates. The calculator drops each vest into the timeline at the right moment, using the rate that will apply on that date — based on a forward projection you can adjust.
• It applies a withholding ratio to each vest. The default is the common US RSU effective tax/withholding ratio; you can override per grant. The post-withholding portion is what flows into the portfolio.
• It runs three scenarios side by side. Baseline, conservative (stronger EUR / lower returns), and aggressive (weaker EUR / higher returns). The FIRE date moves with each scenario; you read the spread, not a single number.
• It surfaces the EUR-base annual expense the projection has to support. That is the number that anchors the 25× target. If the expense baseline drifts, every other figure drifts with it.

The result is a FIRE date with a confidence band, not a single year on a single chart. The Sunday ritual here is quarterly — after each vest, you re-read the band, adjust the inputs, and let the picture sharpen.

You can name your withdrawal-rate assumption and the year your projected portfolio crosses 25× your EUR-base annual expenses — and you can see how a 10% USD weakening shifts that year. If the year does not move when you flip the scenario, the calculator is misconfigured — most likely the RSU pool is being held in EUR rather than USD.

• Multi-currency mechanics — Multi-currency budgeting in the EU
• Understand the mental-model swap — The CFO model of personal finance
• The FIRE calculator deep-dive — Plan your FIRE date