Work backwards from the annual income you want. See the portfolio it requires and the BTC stack that gets you there.
The arithmetic is simple: required portfolio = desired income ÷ withdrawal rate. $60,000 a year at 4% needs $1.5M — 10 BTC if your price thesis is $150,000. The hard part is that the 4% rule was built on assets with a fraction of Bitcoin's volatility.
Withdrawing a fixed amount during a 70% drawdown forces you to sell several times more BTC per year, permanently shrinking the stack — sequence-of-returns risk at its most brutal. Practical mitigations: use a 2–3% rate, hold 2–3 years of expenses in stables, or size withdrawals as a percentage of the current balance rather than a fixed dollar figure.
The Trinity Study found that a 4% annual withdrawal from a 60/40 stock-bond portfolio survived every 30-year period in the historical US record. It works because the portfolio's worst drawdowns were shallow enough that withdrawals never permanently outran recovery. Bitcoin has no such track record — its worst drawdowns are more than double the worst case that rule was built on.
That does not make the rule useless — it makes it a starting point, not a guarantee. Run the calculator at 4% to see the textbook number, then rerun it at 2–3% to see what a genuinely conservative plan requires. The gap between those two numbers is the price of Bitcoin's volatility.
Most people plan retirement forwards — save whatever is left over and hope it is enough. This calculator flips that: state the income you actually want, and it derives the exact portfolio and BTC stack required at your price assumption. That number is often sobering, which is the point — it turns a vague goal into a concrete target you can measure progress against.
Plan the accumulation path with the DCA calculator →