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Financial independence

Coast FIRE calculator

Coast FIRE is the moment you can stop adding to your investments and still retire on time. It arrives years before financial independence does, and for most people it is the more useful date — because it is the one that lets you take the lower-paid job.

Your position

Currency

Changes the symbol on your figures. It does not convert them — there is no exchange rate here.

In today’s money.

The age you would be happy to stop at, not the earliest possible.

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To coast from today you would need

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Retirement target

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Invested today

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You reach coast at

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This calculator needs JavaScript to recalculate. The figures above are a worked example, and every assumption behind them is written out below.

What this assumes

Coasting means adding nothing further to your investments. It does not mean not working — you still have to cover this year’s rent and food out of income. The page is explicit about that because it is the most common misreading of the idea.

Everything is in today’s money, with inflation removed from the return.

The target is your spending divided by your withdrawal rate. No pension is modelled here — use the full FIRE calculator for that, since it changes the target rather than the coasting maths.

What coasting actually means

Compound growth does most of the work in the last decade, not the first. Which means there is a point — usually a long way before you have enough to live on — where what you have already invested will grow into your retirement number on its own, if you leave it alone.

After that point, every additional pound you invest is buying an earlier retirement rather than retirement itself. That is a genuinely different financial situation, and it is the one that lets someone drop to four days a week, move to a job they prefer for less money, or take a year out.

You still have to pay for this year. Coasting is about stopping the saving, not stopping the earning. The number below is what you need invested, not what you need to live on.

Why the coast number falls as you get older

It is the retirement target discounted back by however many years of growth are left. At 30 with a 60-year-old target, thirty years of compounding is doing the work and you need surprisingly little. At 55, there are five years left to grow and the coast number is nearly the full target.

This is the clearest argument for investing early that exists, and it is arithmetic rather than exhortation: the same retirement costs dramatically less if you fund it sooner.

Common questions

What is the difference between Coast FIRE and regular FIRE?
Regular FIRE is having enough to live on without working. Coast FIRE is having enough invested that it will grow into that number by your target age without any further contributions — you still need an income to cover your current costs. Coast arrives much earlier, often ten to fifteen years earlier, which is why it is the more actionable milestone for most people.
Can I keep investing after I hit my coast number?
Yes, and most people do. Passing coast does not mean you should stop; it means you no longer have to. Anything you add after that point pulls your retirement date earlier rather than making it possible at all.
What is Barista FIRE?
The same idea with a part-time job attached — enough invested to coast, plus a low-stress income covering current costs and often health insurance in the US. This calculator handles the invested half; the income half is a question about your own costs.
Does this account for a pension?
Not here. A state pension or Social Security payment reduces the retirement target itself rather than changing the coasting arithmetic, so it belongs in the full FIRE calculator, which models the year-by-year drawdown and can see when the pension starts.

The app this comes from

Coasting only works if you know what you spend

The coast number is your annual spending divided by your withdrawal rate, discounted back. Get the spending figure wrong and everything downstream of it is wrong too. TLDR Money keeps the spending log and the projection in one app so that number is something you have measured rather than guessed.

Not out yet. TLDR Money International is in build for the United States and the United Kingdom first, on iPhone and Android. There is nothing to download and nothing to sign up to — when there is, this page will say so.

Last reviewed 20 August 2026. The arithmetic behind this page is covered by automated tests that run on every deploy.