Chasing the Fionist Dream

Mazal tov to us! We reached Coast FI! 🎉

Cool. Cool. So what does that mean? Weren’t we pursuing FI or FIRE? What’s Coast FI? And why are we so excited?

When we first started this blog three and a half years ago, we had one goal in mind: Financial Independence (Retire Early), or, in other words, investing our way out of the rat race. We were all in: always reading, calculating, optimizing, cutting expenses, increasing our savings rate, running compound interest calculations, and building spreadsheets. We were on a mission to reach our goal as soon as possible.

But then something changed.

As we watched our investments grow, we started exploring different scenarios on our trusty compound interest calculator. What would happen if we invested more each month? What happens if we invest less? Or if we stop investing entirely (*gasp!*) aside from our employer-sponsored pensions and kranot hishtalmut?

We discovered that not only are we on track to hit (and surpass) our FI number by age 50, we could even stop our monthly contributions to our brokerage account and reach our target through our retirement savings and compound interest alone.

We could EVEN stop investing altogether – never invest another shekel – and through the magic of compound interest, we’d still have more than enough money to retire comfortably at traditional retirement age. This stage is known as Coast FI (or Coast Financial Independence) because all of the major investing happens early on, letting you coast comfortably into retirement.

That’s awesome! How do I know if I’m at Coast FI myself? Or how far I am from it?

This depends on several factors and personal lifestyle preferences, but it’s really not hard to calculate. Here’s how you do it.

1. Choose your retirement age. AKA the age at which you want your investments to fully support you (and you no longer need to work). For the purposes of this exercise, we went with 67.
   
   
2. Estimate your annual retirement spending. How much do you expect to spend per year in retirement? Use today’s shekels (or dollars). We’ll deal with inflation later.
   
   
3. Calculate your financial independence number. Multiply your annual spending by 25. This will allow you to withdraw 4% of your portfolio per year without running out of money.
   
   
4. Work backwards. Use a compound interest calculator to find how much money you need to have invested today so that, with no further contributions, it will grow to your full FI number by retirement age. Assume a 7% annual investment return to account for inflation.
   
   
5. This is your Coast FI number! Once you reach it, you no longer need to save for retirement. You just need to cover your current living expenses. 🎉

Now what? Where do we go from here?

Knowing that we are technically done investing for retirement gives us a great deal of flexibility. While we *could* retire at 50, we likely would get bored and still work at some capacity. So why rush?

As a result, we’ve eased up a bit on the race to full financial independence, since we know we will get there anyway. We’re still investing monthly – both in our pensions and kranot hishtalmut and in our brokerage account – but less. Since we know that we will, have enough to retire comfortably, we have started putting more money toward other shorter-term savings goals, such as our daughter’s bat mitzvah, home renovations, and a larger trip fund. We’ve also been spending more on day-to-day things that are meaningful to us and improve our quality of life, including private therapies and giving more to charity. We also keep toying with the idea of moving out of our shoe box of an apartment and getting more space, so we’ll see where that goes.

We discovered that financial freedom is a spectrum, not binary. Nothing miraculous happens the day you hit your FI number. (In fact, we hit Coast FI months ago and didn’t even notice.) But as our net worth grows, so does our sense of security, flexibility, and choice.

Coast FI doesn’t mean we “won” or that we stopped caring about investing. But it does mean that the pressure eased. It means we can make decisions a little more calmly, a little more intentionally, and with a longer view. It gave us permission to slow down, to redirect some energy and money toward the life we want to live now, not just the one we’re planning for decades from now. That’s the milestone we’re celebrating. Not an end point, but a meaningful shift along the way.

We will continue to live life intentionally – cutting costs on things we care less about so we can spend more on things that bring us joy and meaning to our lives. We look forward to sharing the next chapters of our journey with you.

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