How Regular People Can Achieve Coast FI in Their 30s

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2:37Mindy Jensen:In Tuesday's episode, we covered the basics of what COSFI is, how to calculate your COSFI number, and how to achieve it. Well, today we are joined by the couple who created the calculator we used in that last episode, famous for COSFI, the Fioneers. We're going to hear how they achieved COSFI in their 30s, the circumstances that led up to it, and why it was the best option for them.

3:06Mindy Jensen:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen. And with me as always is my pioneer of the FI mustache co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here. And I'm so glad we stumbled across this concept of Coast FI, which we're going to discuss with Jess and Corey today. Mindy's already done a great job introducing them, but we're so excited to welcome them back. Jess and Corey, again, here to BiggerPocketsMoney to talk about their FI journey. Corey and Jess, welcome back to the BiggerPocketsMoney show. Thanks so much for having us. Exciting to be here.

3:36For the folks that might have missed Tuesday's episode, can you quickly define for us what CoastFi is? Yeah, as we think about CoastFi, we like to think of it as both a financial milestone and a lifestyle. So as a financial milestone, it's the point where you've saved and invested enough money that you no longer need to contribute another dollar towards your retirement. The amount that you've already saved and invested will grow to fully fund your retirement. And so while you think of full financial independence as the point where work is optional, at CoastFi, savings is optional. The name CoastFi typically comes from this idea that you're coasting to full financial independence by reducing or stopping altogether your savings.

4:20And what did this look like for you guys? Could you give us a little bit of background on your money journey and how you decided to approach CoastFi? We were pursuing full financial independence and retire early because he had followed the fire movement and Mr. Money Mustache and sort of came to me on an annual basis and said, hey, let's just say 5 % more. I would say, okay, I would rather travel, but if we can travel and we can save more, we'll do this. So it wasn't until about 2018 that I really started to understand what this all meant and the fact that saving more could give us more freedom earlier.

5:01And I got really interested in the financial independence movement. But at the same time, I was already in a job that was really toxic for my mental health. And so I learned about FIRE and I thought this seems like a really interesting idea, but I couldn't see myself pushing through for another 10 years, which is what our timeline was

5:26Mindy Jensen:at the time. And so we were starting to think about what would our path to financial independence look like? And we wanted it to be a slower, happier path. But then really quickly, probably about a week after we like mutually together decided we wanted to pursue this FI thing, I had a mental health crisis and ended up with severe burnout, severe anxiety that had been building over a period of time and needed to take six months completely off of work. And so for us, that threw a wrench into things. I think we had at the time thought we were going to pursue financial independence, but we were just going to do it at like a slightly slower pace and like make sure that we were still enjoying our lives along the way.

6:16And then we really had this fork in the road where we needed to decide like, how are we going to live life moving forward? During that time, we were faced with a lot of questions, particularly how can we start using our financial freedom to improve our lives now? And that led us down a whole bunch of rabbit holes learning about how people were using FU money, people who were semi-retiring. During that time, I learned about this concept called Coast Fi, and it seemed really compelling to us. And so all of this learning led us to say, what if we took our fire path really differently than we expected we would?

7:00Can you tell me a little bit more about maybe three components to this journey. One is, what was the lifestyle looking like prior to this inflection point, this mental health crisis? What did your financial position look like? And specifically, you know, Coastify really emphasizes this theme of having enough save for traditional retirement at traditional retirement age. Was your wealth primarily at that point in retirement accounts? And then the third component of that question is, what did things look like after we began shifting the goal to Coast Fi? So several part question, I can ask them all again in there, but I'd love to hear, you know, those components of the story there.

7:38I'll start by talking about the lifestyle piece. And then Corey, you can jump in and talk about the finances piece. So the lifestyle at that time was really dominated by work. And so we had both started our careers with really, really low incomes. I think like one year collectively, we made$30 ,000 a year living outside New York City. And so after that period of time, we both just put our heads down and we're like, we really need to increase our incomes. And so we had over time really focused on that and really spent the vast majority of our time and energy focused on work and climbing the corporate ladder, which for me led to that really severe burnout and mental health crisis that I had.

8:27We had then gone from, you know, barely surviving to increasing our income significantly, which allowed us to start to save quite a bit, as well as inflate our lifestyle a little bit at the same time. Passing it to you, Cor. Yeah. So when we reached this inflection point, I just pulled it up in our spreadsheet. So if you You see me glancing over here. I have a net worth spreadsheet that I track and have tracked for, gosh, I can scroll over since 2011 or something.

8:59Mindy Jensen:Wow. We've never had a guest with that much information, have we, Scott? Every single guest is like, oh, I've got a spreadsheet. Of course you do. Shocker. The Money Nerd has a spreadsheet, one of many spreadsheets, I guess, right? So in 2018, when we reached this inflection point, we had about half of our net worth in retirement accounts. a significant portion in real estate and about$60 ,000 in cash. Can you walk us through what the real estate portion looked like? Was that in home equity or were you acquiring rental properties at this time? Home equity. I'm gathering a picture of a pretty intense savings situation, maybe living like we were only making a little more than that$30 ,000 combined income that you started out with.

9:42And their work is getting progressively more difficult or challenging, or there's more responsibility or there's more pressure building. And this reaches a boiling point. And what happens next? What changes about your lifestyle and your financial goals at that point? I think the thing that I want to add about the financial picture was at the time we had somewhat inflated our lifestyle. So we were at that time spending about$70 ,000 a year. So we had like more than doubled what we were spending compared to what we were when we first started out. I think at that time had about 300 ,000 in our retirement accounts.

10:21And so that did allow us, like we were able to look at our money and say, how much freedom does this actually give us? And really helped me at that time to be able to say, okay, like I could completely quit this job if I wanted to, or I could take a leave of absence and apply for short-term disability, not knowing if I'm going to get it. At that time, then eventually I took that six month leave of absence, quit the job that was causing the mental health challenges in the first place. And then when I went back to work, actually, we realized that our$300 ,000 had actually allowed us to reach COSFI.

11:07And so it left me with a question of saying, maybe I never need to work full-time ever again at the age of 31. And so I went back to work part-time, got a new job where I worked three days a week as my mental health continued to improve. Time-wise, right, and lifestyle-wise had a lot more freedom and flexibility and time to focus on health and well-being.

11:33Mindy Jensen:Did you go back to the same employer and just ask for part-time work or did you get a whole new job. I got a whole new job. I was going to ask, how did you step down from that? Because I think a lot of people hesitate to ask, can I go part-time? I think a lot of employers hear you ask to go part-time and they think the option is full-time or part-time when really the option is you can have me part-time or you can have me no time because I'm going to go find a job that allows me to do part-time. It's hard for us to reframe that in our minds as well. So I just is to go get another job. And right now when we're recording in July of 2025, the job market is really tight.

12:14Mindy Jensen:But if you're pursuing this in a few years, maybe the job market opens up and you have a lot more options, or maybe you're in a field that's in high demand and you have a lot more options. Do what you want. Don't do what your employer wants. Curious to learn exactly how Jess and Corey achieved Coast Fi? We'll be breaking it down right after this break.

12:38Welcome back. I have another question about the job switch here. There's some situations where this rule could be reversed. I've observed that when, let's say I'm making$100 ,000 or$50 an hour at a job and I want to go part-time, usually that doesn't come with here's$60 ,000 or$50 an hour at that. It's usually, oh, here's$35 an hour and part-time. There's both a reduction in the hourly rate of pay and the total amount of pay. That can definitely be changed. In some cases, you can make more or whatever. How did you find that in your situation? Was there a sacrifice on both the income and benefits or were you able to basically make the same amount just with less hours?

13:17You know, it's interesting because at the full-time job, I was working about 50 hours a week and I was commuting for an hour and a half every day and it was incredibly stressful. And when I took the part-time job. I was working 24 hours a week, no more. I was commuting 20 minutes each way. And so I worked 60 % time and I probably made like 55 % as much. So it was a slight reduction, but felt to me totally worth it. And I know you guys probably know about like the true hourly wage where you take into account like all of the hours you work and spend commuting or preparing or stressing about work and all the costs associated and found that my like true hourly wage at the part-time job was a whole lot higher and the job was a whole lot easier.

14:11Yeah. I love that you mentioned that the commuting costs as well, because that's, that's something I think that I was not factoring in or I was asking the question and a lot of people don't think about if you're having, if you have a long commute and you're working long hours and it's all consuming from a mental standpoint, that could be a huge change. One thing that I will call out as well is it sounds like implied in this conversation is you guys were saving at least 50 % of your income at leading up to the point where this happened. And that's a huge advantage. If you can live off one income, it allows these options to develop in life.

14:44And so I think that that's critical to call out here is this was enabled by even 70 ,000 relatively low spending given your household income. Yeah, the other thing that's really interesting about this one shift in our long journey is that that year after when Jess started working part time, we actually reduced our expenses without even intentionally trying to do so. So life was so busy up to that inflection point that we were spending a lot of money on takeout and kind of convenience. And then after when she had a lot more time and flexibility working part time, we surprisingly reduced our expenses.

15:22I remember the point when we were reviewing our annual expenses and we're like, wait a second, these numbers can't be right. Like, why are we spending so much money less? You know, like and then we had to like dig into it and figure it out and kind of work backwards. It wasn't like, oh, we're earning less, so we should spend less. It was just like mindset and lifestyle change.

15:39Mindy Jensen:So Corey, were you working full time when she went down to part time? I was, yep. And were you still continuing to contribute to retirement accounts, even though you discovered that you were Coast Fi? Yeah, so we were still contributing. So our Coast Fi journey has been one of many small steps. And so the first step was like reducing Jess's part time work. But we'd continue to contribute probably over the next four or five years as we were still earning high income. And why did you choose to continue to contribute if you were already Coast Fi? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it was a combination of we had disposable income.

16:17At the time, I was really enjoying my work. And so I wanted to continue working full time. And there was also certainly a motivation of like scarcity mindset. Like I wanted to have a little bit extra cushion, right? The age old challenge that many of us run into is like, I didn't want to have to worry about it. And so I wanted to save a little bit more. As Corey said, we had a progression over time. And I think it can be really scary for people to go from being in this like full accumulation mode where you're saving 50 % of your income to one, like if people are reaching fire to go to start spending down.

16:56It can also be really scary to go from I'm saving 50 % of my income to saving zero. And so we often recommend in the process that we took ourselves was take a gradual approach. Like what are lifestyle shifts that you can make? And we assumed that me working part time was going to dramatically reduce our savings, right? It didn't because we spent so much less. So then we were like, oh, what's the next change? that we can make. And so about a year later, then I ended up using some of the extra time to start a business and then quit my coaching business. And then I quit the part-time job to focus on that.

17:40Corey was still enjoying his job at that point. So why leave, right? When he didn't need to yet, even though I was like, hey, do you want to leave? We can travel. We can do all of this stuff. But like he just wasn't ready to, he was enjoying that. And so for then the couple years after that, what we did was we decided, okay, what's our future lifestyle? What do we want that to look like? Are there things that we can do now to prepare ourselves for that? And so we did an expensive camper van experiment where we rented out a camper van to see if that was something that we would enjoy doing. And then over the next two years, we bought and we built out our own camper van, which during that two year period of time then reduced our savings rate down to about 20%.

18:28So we cash flowed it, reduced the savings to 20%. And then from there, it was like, oh, well, now we have the evidence that the money is still continuing to grow in the background, right? I think everyone tells you that, but sometimes it's nice to see it from your own life experience. And so then that gave us more confidence to then when, you know, things got frustrating at work for Corey, then he was able to say, okay, maybe it's time for me to go and take a mini retirement and then join me as an entrepreneur. So 2023 was the point where we stopped saving entirely for retirement. So we haven't added a single dollar to retirement since 2023.

19:16Walk me through that inflection point too, and similar question around the financial position in terms of cash. And we know, coastify the retirement accounts were well set, it sounds like, to be fully funded by traditional retirement age. But was there cash or other assets that made you feel more comfortable with both going into the entrepreneurial or leaving the full-time work environment? Oh, absolutely. And I would have to look to get precise numbers, but I remember having about two years of cash or liquid assets that we could tap into to cover our expenses for two years effectively if we didn't earn any income.

19:53By this point, we already had a business that was covering a good portion of our expenses, but not all of them. And so we gave ourselves a long run way to then grow the business for that to be able to fully support and cover just our expenses. Awesome. It was certainly the combination of like the near term and having the cash and the long term, knowing that our retirement was taken care of. I have a couple of observations I'd love to call out. First, one theme here is people say, oh, I don't want to pursue FIRE because I love my job. Right. And that's where you were, Corey, a few years ago. That changes over time.

20:29Nothing stays the same forever. Even though you loved your job then, the fact that you guys were pursuing versions of FIRE, Coast Fire, the things that gave you options in life and building liquidity allowed for when that changed for you to have that flexibility and confidence to do that. Second, and again, there is a rule, but there are plenty of exceptions. The liquidity position, I think, is so critical for the FIRE journey and taking that leap and moving into the entrepreneurial space, building a cash position. And it's not everybody, but it's a big percentage of folks that seem to be much more comfortable with it.

21:02I'm certainly of that type as well, where I feel just much more comfortable having a much greater cash position than the most portfolio theory would suggest. I think it's very compatible with real estate investing and financial flexibility in there. And then the last thing I want to point out is wealth creation, in my observation, is both a process and an event in the sense that it's actually, I think, very good strategy for one spouse in a married couple to work an income where the spreadsheet ties very nicely into it, right? Here's what we're going going to get earned over the next couple of years.

21:33Here's what we're going to spend. Here's what's going to accumulate. Here are the benefits that are going to apply. And then one spouse to work on a business, which has uncertainty, but great upside and flexibility downstream. And I love that that played out in your story here specifically, because I think that the business could fail. Nine out of 10 businesses fail. But if you could repeat that process long enough, you stick with it long enough, there are good odds that over time, that's going to be very successful and will give you future options in life for many people. So I just, those are three observations that I found across many, many of our podcasts here.

22:07And I love that they played out so wonderfully in your situation here and afford you guys a great lifestyle and optionality now. Yeah, I think that's pretty spot on. I think when people see the lifestyle that we have today, they probably think we're really risky. People are like willing to take big leaps forward. But But the reality is it's been a seven year process to get from where we were to where we are today. And it's been small incremental steps to kind of reassure ourselves and kind of mitigate the risk that we saw. All right. Before we take this next break, I just want to let everybody know that we have a special deal for BiggerPockets Money listeners at BPCon 2025.

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