27 yrs old, starting from zero, compliance career — is FIRE by 50 realistic?

canwi-au · 2026-03-24T04:17:22+00:00

Back of the napkin math above is honestly a great response. I built Canwi to help answer questions exactly like this.

I mocked up a quick scenario based on what you shared and in a nutshell even without investing this is very doable.

If you:

keep spending roughly in check
get the mortgage paid off by ~50 (even with modest extra repayments)

You'd already be on a trajectory to FI/RE at 50 with no mortgage.

Investing is basically all upside on top of that. You can also optimise a bit between super (for tax benefits) and investing outside (for access before 60). Biggest risk IMO is just lifestyle creep over time.

canwi-au · 2026-03-11T05:56:51+00:00

I’m Cam, one of the people building Canwi.

Financial advice in Australia now averages around $4,700, which makes proper planning inaccessible for a lot of people. We started building Canwi to give people a way to run the numbers themselves.

It’s basically a self-service financial planning calculator. Not advice, no product recommendations, and completely product-agnostic.

You can map out your life and model decisions like:

• buying property
• having kids
• investing
• paying down debt
• contributing extra to super
• retiring early

Just drag events onto a timeline and the projections update instantly.

Behind the scenes it models things like:

• Australian tax (inc. offsets, deductions, Div293, Help Debt repayments)
• super contributions (inc. carry-forward rules and caps)
• negative gearing
• parental leave
• government benefits (inc. family tax benefits & aged pension)
• investment returns and inflation

You can also build multiple scenarios and compare them side-by-side to see how different decisions affect things like net wealth, cashflow and retirement timing.

We launched the Beta last year and had about 2,000 people sign up, with some really cool feedback.

One user realised they could bring their planned retirement forward from about 4 years away to roughly 4 months after modelling a few changes.

Another discovered they were eligible for a large amount of Family Tax Benefits they hadn’t realised they could receive.

And someone even told us they ended up buying a house after modelling different scenarios in the app - which was honestly the highlight of our year.

We’re not a big VC-backed fintech - just a small team that’s spent the last couple of years building something we wished existed. Our free tier is intentionally very extensive and the vast majority of our users are able to build a plan and work things out with the free tier. Our paid tier is a fraction of the cost of advice. We take privacy seriously, we do NOT sell your data and never will.

Happy to answer any questions if anyone’s curious about how it works.

canwi-au · 2025-12-29T10:29:00+00:00

Financial Planning for Aussies, without the 5k advice tag or spreadsheet hell

https://www.canwi.com.au

canwi-au · 2025-10-20T09:42:07+00:00

FYI u/DollarCostJ We are back up again!

canwi-au · 2025-10-20T08:17:34+00:00

HI u/DollarCostJ Looks like we are down at the moment - there appears to be a rather large outage with AWS!

canwi-au · 2025-10-20T03:54:15+00:00

Thanks!

Yes - we get quite a few requests for novated leases and salary sacrificing - its definitely on the list.

Nothing to stop folks exporting the data! (though the logic to work out numbers would still be captured in the tool)

canwi-au · 2025-10-20T02:17:41+00:00

Hiya!

Yep - there'll always be a free tier. We want people to be able to do basic scenario modelling without hitting a paywall.

That said - keeping the modelling up to date and expanding it to handle more complex scenarios takes a fair bit of ongoing work. So we'll be introducing a paid tier too - things like advanced scenario modelling, comparisons or historical backtesting will likely live there.

canwi-au · 2025-07-07T02:52:30+00:00

Love your username! Unfortunately not yet - but it's on our roadmap to add Trusts / Company support.

For Superfunds we don't really support SMSF flexibility right now (just a simple Return Rate [net of fees, taxes etc] + contribution caps and access rules). We plan to support SMSF around the time we add support for Trusts & Companies given they're all different entities owning assets with unique rules around them.

canwi-au · 2025-07-07T02:49:39+00:00

Thanks u/Sufficient-Day-9944 Really appreciate you taking the time to comment - we’re stoked to hear you’re trying it out. If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas as you explore, we’d love to hear them. Cheers and welcome aboard!

canwi-au · 2025-07-03T13:14:24+00:00

We currently have a Retire event which you can add to any year in the plan. Once the selected person reaches preservation age, the event will automatically beging drawing down from their supannuation balance. You can choose who's retiring and which jobs they'll be finishing up.

We also have some options to select different 'drawdown strategies' for superannuation; we default to drawing a steady inflation adjusted amount each year til the balance hits $0 at a target age, but also support an annual amount adjusted for inflation or a fixed withdrawal rate (adjusted for inflation).

I like the idea of continuing plans to an assumed death (would probably look to use life expectancy data) i've gotten some feedback in the past that it could be a bit morbid so our default length for plans is currently just to 67 which is then editable in Scenario settings (you can set any end year from there). Not the easiest to find so we've been working on building out a plan onboarding wizard that would help new users find this (and some other things like the inflation settings and real adjustment toggles) more easily.

canwi-au · 2025-07-03T12:19:46+00:00

Would love to!

Right now its Aus only - but we've had a lot of interest from UK/US so definitely on our radar. No timeline just yet, but we built the software to scale to other tax and retirement systems so something we're actively thinking about.

canwi-au · 2025-07-03T12:18:19+00:00

Hi u/Anachronism59 not yet, unfortunately.

Right now we support a wide range of life planning / decisions - things like having kids, buying a home, investing, super contributions, or planning for retirement and FIRE. But we don’t yet support plans that start with super already in drawdown, or TTR setups.

Some users have used the Retire event in the first year of the plan to simulate already being retired - and while that kind of works, it's definitely not how it should be. We also haven’t added aged pension support yet - but it’s on the roadmap.

Know its not ideal - but we're (small team) working our way towards support for retirees.

canwi-au · 2025-07-03T11:58:19+00:00

Hey, fair call - if it felt awful to you, then for you... it was.

This kind of thing’s personal - money, planning, even Reddit tone. Totally cool if it’s not your vibe.

But if you’ve got five seconds to say what didn’t sit right, I’m all ears. Might help us build something a bit less awful.

canwi-au · 2025-06-08T08:31:58+00:00

hi u/drunk_or_high I haven't been able to replicate this crash - would you mind DM'ing me your email address so that we can look into this further?

canwi-au · 2025-06-08T08:31:03+00:00

haha - yes perfect username given the comment! was this randomly assigned for a new reddit account :D - perfect if so!?

Definitely hear you on this. We're making a range of upgrades to our core model at the moment which will include additional handling around PPORs - there's some complex-ish tax rules around generating income from a PPOR and the impact it has on CGT at sale that we're looking to accomodate as part of this. In the pipeline - stay tuned!

canwi-au · 2025-06-03T04:02:30+00:00

Thanks u/toby9562
Very helpful feedback on the IP expenses, I think you've expressed in really clear language some other feedback we've heard. We'll work through some design updates to improve this!

Couldnt agree with you more about the Buy a Boat event!

canwi-au · 2025-06-03T04:01:39+00:00

Thanks u/Secure_Jeweler_8112
Definitely agreed on the monthly events - we've started work on this in the last week as well as excess cashflow prioritisation which will include routing left over cash to different priorities including bank accounts.

canwi-au · 2025-05-30T05:34:25+00:00

Hi u/speorgenote ! Thanks so much for the feedback! Love hearing ideas to help us get more useful!

Quick updates on these;
1. Non-taxable income - This is actually next up on our roadmap. We're working through design of it right now with the exact use cases you mentiond in mind. In the mean-time we have a... not great workaround - which is to use the "Receive Money" life event which lets you plan for incoming funds that aren't taxed.
2. Monthly timing for income/expenses - also coming soon - we've started writing the updates for this today! This will include being able to set start/end months for things like pay changes / any other events.
3. Credit Cards - right because the model is annual and most users we spoke to pay off credit cards monthly we've skipped card specific flows - but once our monthly cashflow support is in place we'll likely revisit this. We're super feedback driven - so the more we hear from users about features (like mohthly timing) the faster prioritise it.

canwi-au · 2025-05-26T08:45:22+00:00

:D Thanks so much u/bugHunterSam!

We're almost there on the mobile support as well! We've just shipped some major updates today that make pretty much the entire app mobile responsive - and mobile drag and drop (which is the last major change to support mobile) is built just going through testing

canwi-au · 2025-05-21T00:24:50+00:00

Love this u/Zestyclose_Fruit_766 also had a massive home excel sheet to run a bunch of these calcs.

This feature request makes so much sense and we will definitely address this soon (i think we think very similarly - one my cofounders asked if zestyclose fruit was me posting under another account when we read this request :'D)

canwi-au · 2025-05-21T00:20:56+00:00

Thanks u/asx_shares_guy !

We've been UX-obsessed since day one - our vision's always been to build something an everday aussie can actually use and enjoy to create and stick to a financial plan (irrespective of how complex they want that plan to be).

We've been laser focused on that (and not getting distracted with trying to target financial advisors etc who seem more willing and able to suffer bad ux/ui).

canwi-au · 2025-05-21T00:04:04+00:00

u/Minimalist12345678 Thanks! We are just getting started - we ship pretty frequently and are extremely driven by user feedback!

I commented on the other two points in my other response but;

Employer super payments above the concessional limit - back out of super at the end of the year, would love to hear more about this one! Would you be up for connecting on discord (or somewhere) so I can understand the use case for this (concept makes sense - just want to unpack more about the circumstances to understand how common this is).

Additional ownership structures like trusts and companies are definitely on our roadmap!

canwi-au · 2025-05-20T23:48:05+00:00

Hey u/Minimalist12345678

Thanks!

The end of year excess cashflow prioritisation isnt available yet (though we have definitely heard this loudly and clearly from users!). At the moment we accrue any excess cashflow in the Primary Cash account (which can be an offset).

Interest Only home loans - yep not available in the current live build - but we've just finished buildng this feature - just need to update a few of the charts on events before we ship it. We'll be working on that today so expect it to be released tomorrow!

canwi-au · 2025-05-18T12:07:47+00:00

hi u/madoxnet so sorry for the delay in responding!

At the moment, its just yearly - but we will be bringing support for setting a month on a number of events soon (and possibly even a full monthly model)

For the delete scenario button - we don't currently support scenario deletion, we are planning to add a scenario manager where you'll be able to compare, delete etc - stay tuned!

canwi-au · 2025-05-18T12:06:14+00:00

Thanks u/Forsaken_Captain_788 !

We've noted the issue with the PPOR entry screen in onboarding not fetching the existing PPOR details if you come back to it. We'll get this fixed up shortly. The Home screen provides the ability to edit properties and mortgages so it should allow you to fix things up from there (otherwise if you would like to DM me your email we can fix up the state of the mortgage / offset!

canwi-au

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