Find the amount you need invested today to coast to retirement with no further contributions.
Coast FIRE number
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Full FIRE number
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Current investments
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Status
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The moment you can stop saving
Coast FIRE is the quietly liberating idea that you do not need to keep saving aggressively for the rest of your working life. Once your invested pot is big enough that compounding alone will grow it into your full retirement number by your target age, you have reached Coast FIRE. From that point you only need to earn enough to cover today's expenses. Every peso you would have funneled into long-term savings is suddenly free for living, a career change, raising a family, or simply working less. This calculator finds that threshold and tells you whether you have crossed it yet.
It suits Filipinos who started investing early and want to know if they can ease off the throttle, and equally those weighing a lower-paying but more meaningful role. The honest answer often arrives faster than people expect, because the years of growth ahead do the heavy lifting.
How the target is built from two numbers
The engine works in two moves. First it sets your full FIRE number by dividing your annual retirement expenses by your safe withdrawal rate. A 4 percent withdrawal rate, the figure the calculator defaults to, implies you need 25 times your annual spending invested. Then it discounts that full number back to today using your real rate of return over the years remaining until retirement. The result, the Coast FIRE number, is smaller than your full FIRE target precisely because future growth has not happened yet. Crucially the return you enter is treated as a real return, already net of inflation, so do not subtract inflation a second time.
Coasting from 30 to 60 on PHP 600,000 a year
Use the defaults: you are 30, aiming to retire at 60, expecting to spend PHP 600,000 a year, with PHP 800,000 invested today, a 6 percent real return, and a 4 percent withdrawal rate. The steps below follow the method this calculator uses.
| Step | Result |
|---|---|
| Full FIRE number: PHP 600,000 divided by 4% | PHP 15,000,000 |
| Years of growth left (60 minus 30) | 30 |
| Growth factor at 6% over 30 years | 5.74 times |
| Coast FIRE number: PHP 15,000,000 divided by 5.74 | PHP 2,611,652 |
| Current investments | PHP 800,000 |
| Still needed to reach the coast point | PHP 1,811,652 |
So at 30 you would need about PHP 2.61 million invested to coast, and with PHP 800,000 you are not there yet, short by roughly PHP 1.81 million. The striking part is how the target shrinks as retirement nears: the same PHP 15 million goal discounted over 30 years needs only PHP 2.61 million today, because three decades of compounding multiply that sum more than five-fold. The curve below shows how that single PHP 2.61 million coast amount would itself grow into the full FIRE number with no further contributions.
The assumptions that make or break it
Two inputs carry almost all the risk. The first is your real return. Six percent after inflation is a reasonable long-run figure for a diversified equity-heavy portfolio, but a string of weak years early on can leave you behind the curve, so revisit the number periodically rather than setting it once and forgetting. The second is your withdrawal rate. The 4 percent rule came from US market history, and applying it unchanged to a peso portfolio invested partly in local assets deserves a margin of safety. Many Filipino investors model 3.5 percent to be conservative, which raises the full FIRE number and therefore the coast amount.
A practical tip: Coast FIRE is not a finish line, it is a permission slip. Reaching it does not mean stop investing entirely. Markets wobble, expenses creep, and a buffer above the coast number buys peace of mind. The common mistake is treating the coast figure as a hard floor and quitting all saving the day you touch it.
Where do SSS and a company pension fit in?
This tool models only your own invested portfolio. Any SSS pension you will draw, plus employer retirement pay or a Pag-IBIG MP2 balance, are additional income that effectively lowers the annual expenses your portfolio must cover. If you expect a meaningful SSS pension, subtract that yearly amount from your retirement expenses before entering them, and the coast number drops accordingly. Confirm your projected SSS benefit with the agency.
Should I use nominal returns and inflate my expenses instead?
You can, but not in this tool. It is built around a real return, so enter expenses in today's pesos and a return already net of inflation. Mixing a nominal return like 10 percent with present-day expenses would badly understate the coast number. Pick one consistent basis, and the real-terms approach used here is the simpler one to reason about.