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🐧 How I Achieved Coast FIRE at 33
INSIDE: Why Coast FIRE, My Exact Income and Investments, My Actual Cost-of-Living across SF, Singapore, and Mexico City
Dexter Zhuang
February 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
Happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrated this past week! 🧧
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
FROM OUR OFFICE
📣 Announcing: Our First-Ever Community Call on Feb 6th
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We’re doing a new thing! 💥
Starting in February, we’re kicking off a Monthly Community Call, a monthly gathering for high-performers who want to design their ideal life through strategic career and financial choices:
🌟 Senior professionals building optionality into their work
🌟 Portfolio careerists creating multiple income streams
🌟 Founders maximizing their time and impact
🌟 Business owners growing at their own pace
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
For a limited time, we’ll run it based on a sliding scale / contribute what you want basis. Later, we’ll introduce a small fee for sustainability.
30 seats only.
Sign Up For the Event:
🔥 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:
