GetFired.au

The origin

GetFired.au started as a personal problem.

A few years ago I moved my superannuation from a standard industry fund into a custom mix of ETFs and managed funds. The portfolio performed well, but I had no real picture of the future. So I started building spreadsheets – and quickly realised I could be saving a lot of money and accelerating growth by taking more control: setting up an SMSF, investing selectively in a handful of high-growth ETFs, focusing on long-term performance and ultra-low fees.

The questions piled up fast: how much will my super actually be worth at retirement? Should we be contributing more, or investing outside super? What's the tax impact of each decision? How do investment properties fit in? How do I pull all of this into a single picture?

Then I asked the question that reframed everything:

Why am I actually doing all of this? What's the goal?

The answer was financial independence – the ability to stop working because I have to, and start working on things I actually want to, whether they pay well, a little, or nothing at all.

The gap in the market

Once I had that framing, I went looking for tools to help map the path. What existed:

• US-centric calculators – wrong tax system, wrong super rules, wrong assumptions.
• Simple Australian calculators – too basic to model real decisions or stress-test scenarios.
• Comprehensive tools – locked behind financial adviser engagements costing thousands of dollars.

Nothing was purpose-built for the Australian FIRE journey, accessible enough for someone just starting to ask the questions, and sophisticated enough to be genuinely useful.

The product decision

The instinct was to build a set of individual calculators – super projection, debt recycling, loan amortisation, value screening. Each useful in isolation.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised individual calculators don't solve the real problem. The real problem is: can I see my path to financial independence, and which decisions move that date closer?

So GetFired.au leads with a single, easy-to-use FIRE calculator that anyone – wherever they are on the journey – can use to chart their path to financial freedom. The individual tools exist to support that journey, once someone has seen the big picture.

It might not be as far away as you think.

The name

GetFired is a play on the FIRE acronym – Financial Independence, Retire Early – reframed as something you actively pursue rather than something that happens to you. Getting fired, in this context, is the goal.

The .au is deliberate. Australian superannuation rules, Australian tax law, the local investment landscape – they are the core of the product's value, not an afterthought.