Household model
BasicsFireLotse plans structurally at household level: wealth, cash flow, savings rate, FIRE age and pension start are each a single figure – not per person.
For singles that goes without saying. For couples it means: enter all values as the household total or household average. You then get a consolidated view of your joint financial situation.
What works well:Synchronous couples (shared FIRE date, same pension start, shared health-insurance logic) – simply add up both incomes, assets and savings rates.
Where the model reaches its limits:Asynchronous couples – e.g. one partner retires 5 years earlier, or one is privately and the other statutorily insured. Such cash-flow jumps in the middle of a phase cannot currently be modeled cleanly in the 3-phase model.
Pragmatic workaround:If pension start dates differ, enter an averaged household value (e.g. 65 instead of 63/67). If health-insurance constellations differ strongly, manually set the phase-3 health-insurance values to the household average.
Taxes take marital status into account:In the Taxes view you can choose "married / registered civil partnership" – FireLotse then calculates with income splitting (Splittingtarif), a double basic tax-free allowance (€24,696) and a double saver's allowance (€2,000). This is the only area where the couple is treated as a couple.