Coast FIRE with $300K

What $300K pays for at 65

If you add nothing more and leave $300,000 invested until 65, this is the yearly spending it supports, in today's dollars.

Growth is 7% a year before inflation and 3% inflation, about 3.88% a year after it. Social Security and any pension come on top.

Is $300K already Coast FIRE?

"Yes" means $300,000 grows to your full FIRE number (spending divided by 4%) by 65 on its own. Otherwise the cell shows the age you'd cross the line if you kept adding $1,000 a month.

$300,000 sits in an awkward middle. It’s too much to call a start and, for most people past 30, not enough to stop saving. The tables above show the dividing line: from 25 or 30, it covers a $40,000 retirement on its own, and from 35 on it doesn’t.

Who tends to have $300,000?

Often savers in their mid-30s to mid-40s who have maxed or nearly maxed a workplace plan for ten years or so, and people in their 50s who started late. In the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median retirement balance for families aged 45 to 54 who had an account was $115,000, so $300,000 at 45 is well ahead of the middle. It still pays only about $25,700 a year at 65 if you stop adding to it.

At this size the assumptions start to move your date by years, which is why this page spends more time on them than on the balance.

Harriet: one balance, five answers

Harriet is 36 and an accountant. She has $300,000 invested and puts in $1,000 a month, and she figures on $55,000 a year in retirement. Her FIRE number is $1,375,000 at 4%, and her Coast FIRE number today is $455,463.

Here’s when she reaches it under a few versions of her plan:

The range runs from 41 to never. None of those rows is unreasonable. A 7% nominal return with 3% inflation is the site default, and the methodology page explains why. But 6% is just as defensible for the next 30 years, and so is a lower-stock mix that earns less.

Why a single point of return matters so much

Coast FIRE is a bet that one lump of money compounds for decades without help. Over 29 years, 7% with 3% inflation grows each dollar to about 3 dollars in today’s money; 6% grows it to about 2.3. Nothing else in the plan swings that much from such a small-looking change.

Fees work the same way. A 1% yearly advisory fee turns a 7% return into roughly 6%, which is Harriet’s third row. The SEC’s bulletin on fees shows how that adds up. If you’re paying 1% on $300,000, that’s $3,000 a year, and it’s worth knowing what you get for it.

The two levers I’d pull at $300,000

The first is contributions, as always. Going from $1,000 to $2,500 a month is a big jump for most budgets, but she doesn’t need all of it. At $1,500 a month she’d cross the line at 46 instead of 53.

The second is the retirement age. Planning to stop at 67 instead of 65 gives the money two more years to grow and lines up with Social Security’s full retirement age for anyone born in 1960 or later. It moved Harriet’s date from 53 to 48. Coasting to 67 isn’t the same as working a demanding job to 67. It means the lower-stress work you pick after crossing the line runs two years longer.

I’d plan on the 6% version and treat the 7% version as the upside. If Harriet reaches Coast FIRE under the cautious assumption, a good decade is a bonus. If she plans on the optimistic one and cuts her saving early, a bad decade has nothing to absorb it. The Monte Carlo calculator shows how often each plan works when returns vary year to year, and the $500K page shows the decision she’ll face once she’s close.

Other balances: Coast FIRE with $100K, Coast FIRE with $200K, Coast FIRE with $500K, Coast FIRE with $1M, Coast FIRE with $3M. You can compare them all on one page, or see the Coast FIRE number by age from 20 to 60.