🛟Coast FIRE Calculator
See if you've already saved enough that compounding alone, with no further contributions, will carry you to your retirement number.
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What Is Coast FIRE?
Coast FIRE is the point at which you've saved enough that, even if you stopped contributing entirely today, compound growth alone would carry your portfolio to your full retirement number by your target retirement age. Not with further contributions. Not with a higher savings rate. Just time and returns doing the work you've already paid for.
What makes Coast FIRE meaningfully different from other milestones on the path to financial independence is what it changes about your options before you retire. Full FIRE requires a portfolio large enough to sustain withdrawals starting now. Coast FIRE only requires a portfolio large enough that it will be that size eventually, which is a much lower threshold to cross, often achievable a decade or more before full FIRE.
That gap matters because it represents something concrete: freedom from the financial pressure of aggressive saving. Once you've crossed your Coast FIRE number, you no longer need to maximize your contribution rate, stay in a high-income job you find draining, or choose employers based on salary over fit. The retirement savings problem is already solved. What remains is covering your current cost of living, and that's a much lower bar than covering your current cost of living plus funding your future.
For many people, crossing Coast FIRE is when the relationship with money and work begins to shift in a meaningful way. The anxiety that comes from feeling behind, from watching markets and calculating whether you're on track, from the low-level stress of knowing that every dollar not saved is retirement security not built, can ease significantly. The retirement math no longer depends on what you do next. It's already done. That psychological shift, from scarcity-mode saving to genuine options, is one of the most underappreciated benefits of identifying this milestone specifically.
Reaching Coast FIRE doesn't mean you can quit working. It means you've earned the option to stop saving aggressively. To take a lower-paying job that's more meaningful. To drop to part-time, freelance, or simply stop letting contribution rate anxiety drive career decisions. Growth has taken over the job your savings rate used to do. What you do with that is yours to decide.
How This Calculator Works
The calculator works backward from your full FIRE number at your planned retirement age, then discounts it back to today using your expected return, to find out how much you'd need to have saved right now to "coast" the rest of the way with $0 in further contributions.
Personal Considerations
Coast FIRE is as much a permission structure as a number. People who've internalized years of "save more, spend less" often keep grinding well past the point it's financially necessary, because the identity of being a disciplined saver is hard to set down even after it's done its job.
If you've crossed your Coast FIRE number, the harder question usually isn't financial, it's whether you can tolerate slowing down. Watch for the instinct to immediately set a new, harder goal the moment this one is met. That's not always wrong, but it's worth noticing when it happens automatically rather than by choice.
Arrival fallacy operates in a specific way at this milestone. Unlike hitting full FIRE, crossing Coast FIRE does not grant immediate freedom; it changes what is required of you without changing your current situation right away. The temptation is to treat the milestone as a permission slip to relax, and in a real sense it is, but arrival fallacy shows up when the expected psychological relief doesn't materialize, or when the milestone simply reveals the next anxiety rather than resolving the current one. Status quo bias compounds this on the other side: people who have been maximizing contributions for years often find it genuinely difficult to stop even once the math says they no longer need to. The 'disciplined saver' identity is sticky, and deliberately choosing to save less can feel like falling behind even when the spreadsheet says the opposite.
If what you're feeling goes beyond what a calculator can help with, licensed clinicians are available at SanaNetwork.com, a referral network founded by this site's founder, Dr. Yoendry Torres.
Frequently Asked Questions
Full FIRE means you have 100% of what you need to stop working and live off withdrawals today. Coast FIRE means you have enough that growth alone gets you there by a target date, but you still need income (even reduced income) to cover today's living expenses in the meantime.
It assumes you stop contributing to your portfolio, not that you stop earning income entirely. Most people who hit Coast FIRE keep working in some form to cover current expenses; they just stop needing that income to also fund retirement savings.
Lower the retirement age in the calculator and recheck. Moving the date closer raises your Coast FIRE number, since compounding has less time to do the work.