When I actually quit my job, I wasn’t thinking about retirement. I was really just thinking about running away from my career. I knew it had given me skills I could apply in different ways, and that freelancing was a viable option for me. That felt good enough to take the leap to self-employment.
In the first few years, my only goal was to experiment and live on as little as possible to extend my runway. My goal was simple: cover my cost of living.
During this time, I stopped investing too and for the first few years, I felt incredibly irresponsible about this. But after three or four years of roughly break-even earnings, I sat down and ran the numbers. What I saw on my spreadsheet shocked me: my net worth had increased substantially. I wrote about this realization in How I Think About Money & Retirement While Self Employed. If I continued on my path and only tried to cover my expenses until 65, I would have something like $50,000 or $60,000 a year from my investments and Social Security.
And after four years of hacking a living on my own, this seemed very achievable. I was comfortable being self-employed, had made money in a bunch of different ways, and had many more ideas for things to work on. What I’d seen as several years of failing financially, even while heading in a life direction I was happy about, wasn’t as risky as I’d thought.
This is when someone said to me, “Hey dude, congrats, you’ve reinvented Coast FIRE from First Principles.”
Coast FIRE
The original FIRE movement attracted people trying to live like monks to escape work once and for all. The game was to pursue high-paying jobs and save more than 50% of your salary each year. Once you had saved 25 times your annual spending, you were done. You could be done with work.
But as the movement expanded, not everyone wanted to eat ramen into their 30s. Slowly, people started customizing it to fit different priorities and lifestyles. One iteration is Coast FIRE, which says that you only need to front-load investments while young, then “coast.” Once you’ve built a solid financial base, you can let those savings grow until old age, compounding over time. You don’t need to keep saving aggressively. But the goal is not to escape work. It is to keep working, but just do work in a more chill way or do things you actually enjoy.
While this is not the approach I ever sought to take, it is essentially what I did in my first few years after quitting my job. I think the most interesting thing about it is it forces you to reimagine your relationship with work. It also highlights how valuable early savings can be in life and the power of compounding.
Take a look at the following example of somebody who saved $200,000 by 35. If they never added to that again, the odds that they have a million dollars at age of 65 are extremely high.
The core idea is to separate the financial goals of funding one’s present life and funding one’s future retirement. By solving the retirement problem first, individuals can pursue lower-paying, more meaningful work, take career risks, or prioritize other life goals for decades without jeopardizing their long-term financial security.
The basic math
Let’s say you actually want more than a million dollars at age 65. That’s fine. The way to look at this is in terms of spending per year you need in retirement. You can take a look at this following chart which assumes an 8% year growth and 3% inflation rate.
If you want to spend a hundred thousand dollars a year in retirement, you could instead aim to save about $470k by age 30 or $694k by age 38. These numbers seem far more attainable than what you’d need to save to solve work once and for all, and also makes FIRE a much more reasonable goal, especially if there’s some sort of work you don’t mind doing.
What $1 million supports in retirement: about $35,000 a year.
| To spend $100,000 a year in retirement | Traditional FIRE | Coast FIRE |
|---|---|---|
| Saved by age 35 | $2.86M | $661k |
| Work from 35 to 65? | No | Yes, enough to cover what you spend |
| Keep saving after 35? | No | No |
| Saved by 65 | Already there at 35 | $2.86M, grown on its own |
Same assumptions as the table below: investments grow 5% a year after inflation and you withdraw 3.5% a year, so $100,000 a year takes about $2.86M. Retirement here is at 65; the table below uses 67, so its numbers run a little lower.
| Spending a year | 22 | 26 | 30 | 34 | 38 | 42 | 46 | 50 | 54 | 58 | 62 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $500k | 1,590 | 1,933 | 2,349 | 2,855 | 3,471 | 4,219 | 5,128 | 6,233 | 7,576 | 9,209 | 11,193 |
| $250k | 795 | 966 | 1,175 | 1,428 | 1,735 | 2,109 | 2,564 | 3,116 | 3,788 | 4,604 | 5,597 |
| $225k | 715 | 870 | 1,057 | 1,285 | 1,562 | 1,898 | 2,307 | 2,805 | 3,409 | 4,144 | 5,037 |
| $200k | 636 | 773 | 940 | 1,142 | 1,388 | 1,687 | 2,051 | 2,493 | 3,030 | 3,683 | 4,477 |
| $175k | 556 | 676 | 822 | 999 | 1,215 | 1,477 | 1,795 | 2,181 | 2,652 | 3,223 | 3,918 |
| $150k | 477 | 580 | 705 | 857 | 1,041 | 1,266 | 1,538 | 1,870 | 2,273 | 2,763 | 3,358 |
| $125k | 397 | 483 | 587 | 714 | 868 | 1,055 | 1,282 | 1,558 | 1,894 | 2,302 | 2,798 |
| $100k | 318 | 387 | 470 | 571 | 694 | 844 | 1,026 | 1,247 | 1,515 | 1,842 | 2,239 |
| $90k | 286 | 348 | 423 | 514 | 625 | 759 | 923 | 1,122 | 1,364 | 1,658 | 2,015 |
| $80k | 254 | 309 | 376 | 457 | 555 | 675 | 820 | 997 | 1,212 | 1,473 | 1,791 |
| $70k | 223 | 271 | 329 | 400 | 486 | 591 | 718 | 873 | 1,061 | 1,289 | 1,567 |
| $60k | 191 | 232 | 282 | 343 | 416 | 506 | 615 | 748 | 909 | 1,105 | 1,343 |
| $50k | 159 | 193 | 235 | 286 | 347 | 422 | 513 | 623 | 758 | 921 | 1,119 |
| $40k | 127 | 155 | 188 | 228 | 278 | 337 | 410 | 499 | 606 | 737 | 895 |
| $30k | 95 | 116 | 141 | 171 | 208 | 253 | 308 | 374 | 455 | 553 | 672 |
| $20k | 64 | 77 | 94 | 114 | 139 | 169 | 205 | 249 | 303 | 368 | 448 |
The big shift for me: I liked work and breaking even wasn’t exciting enough
I only realized I’d been doing some form of Coast FIRE after I quit my job. It was never a deliberate plan, and it never involved extreme frugality or grinding through years of deprivation.
I have always saved aggressively, at least compared to peers, but never more than 20–30% of my income. I took vacations with friends, bought rounds for friends at the bar, and enjoyed eating at good restaurants. I managed to save a substantial amount by maximizing retirement and Roth contributions and being reasonable about big-ticket expenses like housing.
I never lived in the worst places, but I never stretched for the best either. I always had roommates. The most I ever paid for housing was $2,000 a month in New York, which was about 15% of my income at the time but before those two years, never spent more than $1,200 a year living in Boston. I did prioritize personal freedom and saw money as a way to create more options down the road but never set out to “retire.” If I had been more exposed to people embracing fire, might I have embraced it? Probably. But Given my overwhelming desire for freedom, I think I would have left as soon as I had some small buffer to take a chance on working on my own.
In Bali in 2019, I was living in paradise but scared to spend money. I ate granola and made my own coffee at home, would go out to lunch and dinner for $2-3 meals, joined a coworking space for less than $50, and more or less avoided doing much else. I had a great time writing, working on projects, and watching sunsets, but I was still afraid to spend money. Part of this was a lack of steady income coming in and a loss of interest in the one kind of work I knew I could make money with (consulting).
I had been living in Asia for several months and had gotten my spending down to under a thousand dollars a month. I know because I was tracking every dollar. In Bali, I remember my friend Jonny would go to this spa in the afternoons. It was something like $20, and that felt too painful to me, so I skipped stuff like that.
Looking back, this was clearly a mistake. I now realize that spending money on my health and nervous system is worthwhile. I also realized that my fear of spending was at odds with how I was actually living. I was launching online products and putting my writing out there, but I was scared to spend in ways that said to myself, “Yeah, I’m going to figure something out.”
The biggest thing that quitting my job did was force me to realize that being frugal is only one part of the equation, and given that I was pursuing a creative path, it was likely not going to be a useful primary aim. I wrote in The Pathless Path:
On the pathless path, the pressure of conformity is not a major concern, but that does not mean an ideal life will emerge automatically. You need to take steps to create it, and in those months in Asia, I started to realize that I needed to graduate from my role as accountant. Minimizing spending is a useful step in lowering the pressure of making money, but it’s not a lifestyle. While it gave me the confidence to make drastic changes without sacrificing my happiness, it kept me in a mindset of scarcity instead of leaning into possibility.
Do I still worry about money? Yes. But now I’m hyper-aware of how my financial insecurities might distract me from efforts that will help me stay energized and motivated on this path. Instead of playing to not lose, I’m playing to win.
Behind our money fears are existential fears, like the fear of death or the fear of not being loved, respected, and admired. These fears are likely not solvable but we can learn to coexist with them. This is also why financial worries can be infinite and people can chase more and more their entire lives. The flip side of this is that if we can learn to coexist with our financial insecurities, we can turn them into a secondary concern. This opens you up to the real secret: the opportunities of the pathless path are infinite too.
A big shift over the next year was figuring out how to spend money in the direction of my creativity. That was a huge unlock. At times, I was spending more than I was making, which was terrifying and broke the hidden contract of Coast FIRE that I’d been following.
Over time, though, I realized that the whole point of my path was to find work I enjoyed doing. Spending a little money on things like a webcam to create a course or an online service for email marketing just made sense.
This is the question I think Coast FIRE helps us ask:
What if financial independence supported meaningful work rather than replaced it?
Leaving earlier than any FIRE number
I think the real power of Coast FIRE is that it takes the pressure off doing work you don’t want to do, or at least frees up energy by letting you do something a little more chill. This enables you to redirect that slack in your life toward building skills, cultivating relationships, pursuing interests, and building confidence to find, create, and invent new kinds of work.
A big reason I took the leap without much of a plan is that I knew at least I could do part-time or freelance consulting. It was a growing, established freelance market, and people were always looking for part-time support. After quitting my job, I was in a desperate attempt to find this kind of work. But as soon as I did, I took my foot off the gas pedal a bit and learned to enjoy some of the space I had relative to a non-stop full-time client service job.
A big realization in my first year was that I had a lot of relationships that I could tap into. As a natural social butterfly, I knew many people and was the kind of person who was always helping others. While expecting reciprocity from everyone you know is delusional, I had a sense that at least some of those people could help me. And in fact, I was on the receiving end of many generous offers. I think in pursuing things like financial independence, we forget that one of the beautiful things about life is actually being interdependent.
For some people, the pressure of earning money on their own is incredibly stressful. But you don’t have to go all in. You can take a year to experiment with freelancing or different ways of working and decide that you preferred your old job.
Which means maybe there are better goals than earning or acquiring a certain amount of money?
Pathless FIRE?
I think Coast FIRE is interesting because it does not reject work. It embraces being smart about money and then says, yeah, you’re still going to actually work.
This is interesting because it creates the possibility that coast FIRE can be a temporary step to a more interesting path.
I’m officially coining that more interesting post-Coast FIRE step “Pathless FIRE.”
Coast FIRE = Quit when you saved enough and have enough confidence you can cover your burn until retirement, allowing you to worry less about work
Pathless FIRE = Quit when you are crazy enough to do whatever it takes to search for a more interesting life path forward and a solid safety net you'll work like crazy to avoid needing
Pathless FIRE rejects the idea that money can solve life problems or work problems and instead, it says that money is a tool to buy your freedom right now such that you can move toward a better relationship with work and a more interesting life path that feels sustainable.
This buys you freedom to embark on the search for what I call “good work,” a kind of work that feels integral to how you want to live, rather than a necessary evil that you must endure. If you were to define it more clearly it is:
- Acknowledging you are not in the right work and life situation and are ready to embrace a chapter of reinvention
- You have saved some money to fund an initial period of exploration of at least six months
- The goal is to find work to extend that runway period for 2-3 years
- That period will be one of experimentation with the goal of improving your relationship with work, finding new kinds of work, and finding a life mode worth committing to
Essentially, Pathless FIRE is saying, “Okay, I have this safety net. If I don’t invest and save for the future for a few years or even longer, I’ll be more or less okay. I can spend down some of my savings too. I might be risking a guaranteed retirement or riches, but screw it, I’m going to take the leap because I need to find a better setup for my life.”
There’s also upside, because you are still working, and working on things you care about. Here’s a conservative estimate of someone who covers their expenses at least every year and has a number of good years in which they invest a little more.
There is probably some downside variability too. At least in the first few years, you may be willing to lose a little more money. Along the way, you may also invest some money in trying to build something up: your own creative work, or starting a company. This means there may be more volatility on this path.
You can see this illustrated below. (It’s worth noting that Coast FIRE doesn’t come without risks either, but I’m showing it as a base case.)
It’s also just acknowledging many things that I’ve come to see.
- Sabbaticals tend to make people happier
- People can radically improve their relationship with work in a couple of years
- Many people do enjoy work, it’s just that they haven’t given themselves permission to try many different kinds of work.
I now have work and know I can feel good about it, which enables me to look at life in an optimistic way. Instead of optimizing to escape work entirely, my entire game is about building enough financial cushion such that I can both do work that funds the journey (and sometimes contributes to retirement) while also pursuing meaningful projects that fuel my desire to keep going.
For me, the change is that I see so many more opportunities to make money, and my relationship with work has improved. I think that’s the most interesting thing about FIRE: you can move from “I hate work, I want to escape it, I need money to solve that” toward a path where work is actually an interesting and fulfilling part of life.
Shifting from a FIRE number to a freedom fund
Pathless FIRE does not look at money as a solution to life’s problems but sees your relationship with money as a form of self-discovery. Most people either dismiss money as unimportant or let it dominate their decisions. Both stances keep you trapped. To me, money is simply a tool to live the life I actually want to live and to follow my dreams.
Through this lens, aiming at a FIRE number doesn’t make sense. Instead, what’s more important, at least when you leap, is having a “freedom fund.” This is money to buy freedom right now to move toward the life I want.
I also like to call this Leap Capital, saying: If I had X amount, I would take risk Y for Z period.
I’m almost 10 years into this journey and I still track how much runway I have, in a number of ways. I track the savings in my business account and the runway that gives me. I track my personal savings and the runway that gives me, as well as scenarios of how much time I have if my income drops 75%, 50%, and 25%.
I do these analyses as a sanity check on my own emotional impulses. I know with the money that I am someone that is very conservative, and sometimes that means my fears aren’t matching my actual reality. When I see that I actually have years of runway, if my income dropped 50%, I can take a step back and realize two things.
- that I’m in really good shape and a 50% drop doesn’t seem probable in the short term.
- I have a lot of time to figure things out, meaning I should probably prioritize the work I actually care about.
The goal of being Pathless isn’t to never work again but to work from connection rather than grind. It’s also pursuing a work life that is not a rigid identity. It is embracing seasons of creativity, ups and downs, seasons of exploration, contemplation, breaks, time for family, time for sprints, and time for bold, ambitious endeavors.
Pathless FIRE acknowledges that the hardest part isn’t accumulating money but figuring out what you actually want to do with your life.
Run your own numbers: the FIRE calculator has a Coast FIRE mode.