Coast FIRE Is the Number Most People Should Actually Be Chasing

Most people who look up early retirement are doing it because of a job, not because of a portfolio. Something happened at work. A reorg, a manager, a Sunday evening that felt worse than the last one. And the question underneath “how do I retire early” is usually smaller and more urgent than it sounds: how do I stop needing this.

Full FIRE is usually two decades away or more. Coast FIRE is usually about half that.

What the number is

Coast FIRE is the balance at which you can stop contributing entirely and still land on your retirement target, on time, from growth alone.

Say you want $60,000 a year in retirement and you plan to draw 4%. That is a $1.5M target. If you are 32 and retiring at 65, you have 33 years of compounding ahead of you. At 5% real, you need:

$1,500,000 ÷ 1.05³³ = about $299,000

Hold roughly $299,000 today and you could never add another dollar and still have $1.5M in today’s money at 65. That is the whole idea. The pot finishes itself.

The number rises as you get older, because the discount period shrinks. At 40 aiming at the same target, it is around $443,000. At 50, around $722,000. This is the part people find counterintuitive: the Coast FIRE number goes up with age even though the goalpost has not moved. Waiting costs you, and it costs you more every year.

Half the wait, same life

Compare the two targets. Full FIRE at $1.5M against Coast FIRE at $299,809. If you have $120,000 invested and you are putting away $1,500 a month at 5% real, you cross the coast line in about 15 years. You cross the full line in about 28.

Thirteen years. That is the gap, and it is bigger than most of what people argue about on forums.

Nothing about your life changed between those two calculations. Only which question you asked.

Nobody actually stops saving

Here is the part that gets left out of the explainers. Almost nobody who hits Coast FIRE stops contributing. I have never met anyone who did it on purpose and stuck to it.

What changes is that you could. And the option turns out to be the valuable thing, not the act. Reaching coast is what lets someone take the job that pays fifteen thousand less and is enormously better. Or drop to four days. Or go through a layoff without the specific flavour of panic that comes from having no cushion and no plan.

The number converts a retirement date into leverage you can use this year. For most people that was the actual goal, described badly.

Where it goes wrong

Two assumptions do most of the damage, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is your real return. Between 4% and 6% real, the coast number for a 33-year runway moves by about a third. That is not a rounding error, it is the difference between “two years away” and “seven years away.” Nobody knows which figure is right. Run it at both and treat the gap as the honest answer rather than picking the one you like.

The second is your spending estimate, and this one is worse because people are confidently wrong about it. If you have never tracked what a year costs you, your number is probably low. Not by a little. Add 15% and see what happens to the date.

There is also a quieter problem with coasting specifically. The maths assumes you leave the money alone for three decades. If “I can stop contributing” turns into “I can dip into this,” the compounding that was doing all the work stops doing it, and you find out about ten years later.

Try it on your own numbers

The Coast FIRE calculator runs this on your balance, your spending and your timeline, and shows the year your savings line crosses the coast line. It is free and it stores nothing.

If the year it gives you is sooner than you expected, that is normal, and it is worth sitting with for a minute before you decide what to do about it.