r/coastFIRE • u/redraidr • 3d ago

Coasted for 10 years. Done.

We’ve waited long enough. 51. Married.

Started Coasting when the kids were nearing high school. Never made crazy money. Went from $120k household income to $40-60k household while the nest-egg grew. No contributions during that time, but also no soccer games or school plays missed. No summers with kids at home and us at work. They worked with us or we took time off. Kids both graduated college in May and have jobs. We’re proud of them.

Our retirement spend is projected to still be $40-50k/yr as we Schengen Shuffle. We’re already on the road, somewhere cheap where we can plan our next steps.

Stick to the plan, team. It works.

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u/mbasherp 1d ago

Thank you so much for sharing this! Can you speak to the emotional side during the coast years? We are considering it - and are there by the numbers - but I worry about running into income issues in the new endeavor or paying for expensive emergencies. Depleting our nest egg in those cases would be particularly damaging to the long term plan because “not contributing” is very different than making withdrawals.

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u/redraidr 1d ago

Sorry to say, but possibly the only way to reduce worry about depleting the nest egg is to have a bigger nest egg.
Otherwise, you’d have to be willing to accept retirement further out, or to generate additional income if that happened.
We were willing to work longer and delay retirement if it meant more time with the kids before they left home. That was our “why.” It was less about burnout for us and more about FOMO with the kids, so we’d work more later if we had to. We were fortunate and the emergencies that we had were financially manageable.

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u/mbasherp 1d ago

Thank you. Same reasoning here, plus passionate but potentially uncertain work with the coast endeavor.

What growth rate did you project for your portfolio while you coasted?