Today, in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
- 💼 Why Coast FIRE is my favorite alternative to traditional FIRE
- 📊 The exact income and investments that helped me reach Coast FIRE by 33
- 🎯 My actual cost-of-living across the San Francisco, Singapore, and Mexico City
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📣 Announcing: Our First-Ever Community Call on Feb 6th
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This isn't a typical webinar—it's a curated conversation with like-minded peers who are redefining success on their own terms.
Every month, we’ll deep-dive into a specific theme (so you won’t get bored).
Our February 2025 topic: Intro to Portfolio Careers
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🔥 How I Achieved Coast FIRE at 33
Business Insider recently featured my story of hitting Coast FIRE in my early 30’s.
While some folks pursue early retirement (FIRE), others want to keep working—albeit with more flexibility and meaning.
That's why I chose to share with BI about how I achieved Coast FIRE as a tech worker at growth-stage startups—and how that journey led me to starting Money Abroad.
How I define Coast FIRE:
Saving aggressively in your early working years until your portfolio's expected growth would cover your future retirement.
What I’ve learned is that money is a tool. Use it to live life according to your values, not the ones that others expect.
In this edition, I am going to share exactly how I invested to achieve Coast FIRE in my early 30’s.
What is Coast FIRE?
Coast FIRE is having enough in retirement investments that the current amount will grow to cover your future retirement—without contributing another penny.
This isn’t retiring early.
You still need to earn enough to cover your day-to-day expenses.
However, this milestone can free you up to transition to working part-time or on things you enjoy, take a break or sabbatical, or experiment with your lifestyle.
This is in contrast to FIRE which focuses on aggressively saving and investing up to your target early retirement age.
If that’s something like 40, then that means potentially trading off your current lifestyle to step on the gas pedal of investment growth until this age.
While FIRE is great for folks who have the willpower (and clear vision for post-retirement life), Coast FIRE was a better fit for me given that I could gain peace of mind and career flexibility.
Like FIRE. But less extreme.
How did I calculate my Coast FIRE number?
I used this online calculator to calculate my Coast FIRE number.
You need to input the following assumptions:
- Your current age
- Expected retirement age
- Annual spending in retirement
- Current invested assets
- Monthly contribution
- Investment growth rate
- Inflation rate
- Safe withdrawal rate
What I used:
- 7% investment growth rate
- 3% inflation rate
Here's an example of what a 31-year-old expecting to work until their mid-60’s would need to invest to hit CoastFIRE:
My income and investing journey
In the first 10 years of my career from 2013 to 2022, I made an average cash compensation, including base salary and bonuses, of $133,000.
In 2023, I quit my 9-to-5 career and started building my education business, Money Abroad, and consulting for startup CEOs.
I make less than I do from my 9-to-5 career, but enjoy greater flexibility and control over my time.
Early/mid 20’s
After college, I moved to San Francisco and started working my first full-time job as a product manager.
At this stage, I was mainly investing in boring index funds through my 401(k) retirement account and my taxable brokerage account.
My first employer gave us a 50% match up to 6% of my salary, which I definitely took advantage.
Aside from investing, my financial priorities were building:
- 6-month emergency fund
- Self-development
Growing my earning potential was a top priority in this phase.Over the next 5 years, I grew my income 3x through gaining 4 raises, 2 promotions, and 1 employer change.I invested a healthy chunk of the proceeds, which helped start the compounding.
Late 20’s/early 30’s
During my 1-year travel sabbatical, I basically forwent income (aside from my career coaching side hustle).
After moving to Singapore, I was regularly investing again.
While I didn’t have a 401k plan due to being an expat, I still contributed to a Roth IRA, Traditional IRA, and taxable brokerage.
The silver lining of the Covid epidemic was revenge investing (see what I did there?)
In 2022, I was investing over 35% of my income.
This helped me snowball my investments further.
My current portfolio
Fast forward to now, I have diversified my portfolio further across various asset classes.
My portfolio:
- ~15% cash
- 6-month emergency fund
- Family fund
- High-yield savings
- 4-week US treasury bills
- ~65% public equities
- 75% US - VTSAX (Total Stock Market Index), VOO, VXF
- 25% Non-US - VTIAX (International Stock Index), VXUS
- ~15% real estate/REITs
- ~5% high-risk (angel investments/crypto)
My investing strategy is simple.
Here are my basic tenets:
- Invest for the long-term (10+ year time horizon)
- I’m moderately aggressive on risk spectrum
- Index investing > active investing
- Dumbbell strategy (mix of low + high risk)
Overall, I lean towards the Boglehead camp (although I also disagree on certain aspects).I don’t think I am going to succeed where professional active funds have failed in terms of stock picking.Even if I could, I still wouldn’t want to spend the time to try to crack the code. I prefer living outside of the spreadsheet.In a nutshell, my philosophy is to balance building wealth for the future with living my current lifestyle.
How I calculated my annual spending in retirement
I have lived in SF, Singapore, and Mexico City—and in each city, the cost of living differed significantly.
Here is my rough average monthly expense (USD):
- San Francisco: $6,500
- Singapore: $5,000
- Mexico City: $3,500
For this level of spending, I actually felt like my lifestyle has been very comfortable in each city.
I didn’t feel like I couldn’t afford anything critical in my life. The only obvious thing that comes to mind are business class seats on long-haul flights. For the most part, I’m a happy camper.
So then, I picked a reference point for retirement.
I suspect that I will retire in a high-cost-of-living city like Singapore, but not a very-high-cost-of-living city like San Francisco.
Hence, I chose our monthly spend of $5,000 in Singapore as my benchmark for retirement spending.
Of course - if my wife and I start a family, then our costs will rise. I have definitely factored this into our spending for the next couple decades.
However, I don’t think this will impact the amount we need for our retirement spending in our mid-60’s (kid would be out of the house by then).
In conclusion
The path to Coast FIRE isn't about frugality—it's about making intentional choices.
Here's what made the biggest difference for me:
- Front-loading investments in my 20s when I had the highest savings capacity
- Focusing on income growth (3x in 5 years) rather than extreme budgeting
- Keeping investments simple with index funds (no need to be a pro stock picker)
- Being flexible with lifestyle and location arbitrage
Whether Coast FIRE appeals to you or not, the principles remain true:
- Know your numbers
- Invest early and often
- Focus on career (earnings) growth
- Design your life intentionally
Finally, you don’t HAVE to retire to create options for yourself.
Coast FIRE may offer enough flexibility to explore different career paths, take calculated risks, or simply work on your own terms.
The key is enough.
Find the path that aligns with your values.
What do you think? Reply to this email and let me know your comments.
🌐 Beyond your borders
🤑 Ankur sold Teachable for $250M+ in 2020. Like any good startup founder, he ran an A/B test: he gave half the money to Goldman Sachs, and he invested the other half personally. Five years later, here’s the surprising results.
📊 Technology makes up over 30% of the S&P 500. That’s so much that the U.S. stock index funds have become a partial bet on the U.S. technology sector. So should you own international stock funds to diversify?
🧠 Social snippets
Here is where $10.3M+ households allocate their money according to Fed Reserve data.
I shipped a simple app in ~5 hours as a non-technical builder. Thanks to Vercel V0 and Cursor AI. (more on this topic in an upcoming guest feature!)
For daily insights, follow me on Linkedin or Threads.
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