Coast FIRE is the quieter half of financial independence. It is the corpus at which compounding alone carries you to your FIRE number by your target age — no further investing required. You still work, you still spend what you earn, but the retirement question is settled. For most people it arrives a decade or more before full independence, and almost nobody calculates it.
In today’s money.
Not counting the home you live in.
Nominal, before inflation.
RBI targets 4%, band 2–6%.
Sets the FIRE number you are coasting to.
This calculator needs JavaScript. The arithmetic is one line: divide your FIRE number by (1 + real return) raised to the number of years left. That is your Coast FIRE corpus.
—
—
In today’s money, at your chosen withdrawal rate.
—
Everything runs in today’s rupees: the nominal return is deflated by inflation to a real rate, so the corpus you see is comparable to money in your hand now. Coast FIRE assumes you add nothing further and touch nothing before the target age. It does not assume you stop working — you still need income for living costs. Tax on withdrawals is not modelled.
Full financial independence means the corpus covers your expenses forever. Coast FIRE means something narrower and far more reachable: the corpus is large enough that compounding alone gets it to the full number by the age you picked. From that point, every rupee you invest is optional.
The distinction matters because it changes what the number is for. A full FIRE number tells you when you can stop working. A Coast FIRE number tells you when you can stop optimising — when you can take the lower-paid job you actually want, or drop to four days a week, without the retirement plan quietly breaking. That decision usually arrives long before the retirement one.
Compounding is back-loaded. A corpus growing at a real 5.7% doubles roughly every twelve and a half years, so the last decade before your target age does far more work than the first. Twenty-three years of untouched compounding turns roughly a quarter of the target into the whole of it. That is not a trick of the arithmetic; it is the arithmetic.
Which is also why the number is sensitive to the target age. Push independence out by five years and the Coast FIRE corpus drops by roughly a quarter, because compounding gets five more years to work. Pull it in by five and it climbs by about a third. The withdrawal rate you assume shifts it in the same way — see the full FIRE calculator for why 3–3.5% is a more defensible assumption in India than the American 4%.
Coast FIRE is a projection built on a smooth real return, and no portfolio delivers one. A sequence of poor early years leaves you short even if the long-run average holds, and the model has no way to show that. Treat the number as a threshold to re-check annually, not a finish line to cross once.
It also assumes you genuinely leave the corpus alone. Coasting while dipping into the same pot for a car or a wedding is not coasting; it is spending. If the money is going to be needed, it does not belong in this calculation.
Coast FIRE is the corpus at which you can stop adding money and still reach your full financial independence number by your target age, purely through compounding. You keep working to cover living costs, but you no longer need to invest. It is typically reached ten to twenty years before full independence.
Lean FIRE is a smaller target — full independence on a reduced lifestyle, often 70% of current spending. Coast FIRE is the same full target, reached later without further contributions. Lean FIRE changes the destination; Coast FIRE changes only whether you keep paying for the journey.
The calculator derives it from your nominal return and inflation, which is more honest than assuming a real rate directly. An equity-heavy Indian portfolio assumed at 11% nominal against 5% inflation gives roughly 5.7% real. Lower it if your allocation includes significant debt, and re-check the assumption rather than inheriting it.
Not if you live in it. A home you occupy produces no withdrawable income, so it cannot fund expenses in retirement without being sold or mortgaged. Count invested assets: mutual funds, stocks, EPF, NPS, and property you genuinely intend to sell or rent out.
Yes. A market fall can drop you below the threshold, and inflation running above your assumption raises the target. That is why the number is worth recalculating annually rather than declaring reached once. The threshold moves; the arithmetic does not.
TLDR Money tracks the corpus this calculation depends on — mutual funds, stocks, EPF, gold — and shows the Coast FIRE threshold moving as the market and your contributions do. Subscription only. No commission on anything you hold.
Join the waitlistNo spam, ever.
Calculator and assumptions last reviewed 5 August 2026.
This is an explanation of arithmetic, not advice about your money. TLDR Money is not a registered investment adviser and earns nothing from any product mentioned here. Figures are illustrative; your own numbers, taxes and circumstances will differ.