Dividend snowball calculator
Dividends reinvested buy shares that pay dividends. Put your numbers in and see where that ends up.
Freedom in
Your dividends cover your 1,000 EUR/mo goal — in today's money.
Because prices rise, that's about 2,433 EUR/mo by 2062 — the climbing dashed line. Same life, bigger number.
The capital then lasts about 32 more years.
Capital at freedom
752,577 EUR
≈ 301,834 EUR in today's money
You'll have invested
358,404 EUR
your own contributions
Earned by your money
384,174 EUR
dividends and compounding
Your journey to freedom
monthly income, in future moneyYour passive income (solid) climbing to meet your goal (dashed). The goal line climbs with inflation, so it always equals your target in today's money — they cross at freedom.
Milestones
¼ of your goal
2037
Half your goal
2047
¾ of your goal
2056
Full freedom
2062
What would change this?
How each lever moves your freedom date, all else equal.
Add 100 EUR/mo
4y 10mo sooner
+0.5% yield
5y 4mo sooner
Goal 10% lower
3y sooner
Inflation +1%
7y 9mo later
Stop guessing the inputs
The same projection, on your actual portfolio
Everything above ran on numbers you typed. With a free account it runs on your holdings instead — and keeps running as they change.
- Your real yield, net of the withholding your brokers actually take
- Your plan saved — come back to it instead of retyping it
- Prices and dividends updated for you, so the date stays current
- The months your income actually lands in, not a monthly average
Your starting point
Portfolio value
10,000 EUR
Yield
4.00%
Monthly dividend
33/mo
what the portfolio pays today, before new contributions
The full picture
Your money vs your money working
Dashed: what you put in. Solid: what it became.
Total capital
Everything you'll have — the dividend pool plus any other capital — over time.
Monthly income vs objective
The full timeline behind the journey chart above.
This line is a monthly average — real dividends arrive in clumps.
This is a projection, not a prediction — and not financial advice.
What this calculation assumes
- Your yield, your contribution and inflation are assumed to hold steady for the whole projection. None of the three has ever held steady for forty years.
- Dividends are treated as arriving smoothly each month and being reinvested immediately. Real payments arrive in clumps, and a cut is not in the model at all.
- Share prices are assumed to grow with your dividends, so the yield stays where you put it. A market that reprices your holdings changes both.
- No tax is applied to the numbers you type. Withholding and income tax both come off the income you actually receive.
- Past dividend growth is not carried forward, and no company here is judged safe. Whether a payer keeps paying is a separate question this page does not ask.
How the dividend snowball works
A snowball rolling downhill picks up snow, and the bigger it gets the more it picks up. Dividends do the same thing when you reinvest them: every payment buys more shares, those shares pay their own dividends, and the income grows without you adding anything. Your own contributions push it along; the compounding is what makes the last years so much steeper than the first.
That is why the curve above bends. Early on, almost all the growth is money you put in. Later, most of it is money your money made — the chart labelled "your money vs your money working" is that crossover, drawn.
Financial independence, in this version of it, is the year your dividend income covers your living costs. The goal line climbs because prices do: covering 1,000 EUR a month today takes a bigger number in twenty years for the same life. That is the dashed line, and where the two meet is the date.
The lever that moves the date most is rarely the yield. Reaching for a higher one usually means reaching for riskier payers, and a cut resets years of compounding. Contributing more, or wanting less, moves it further and costs nothing in risk — which is what the four cards above are for.