Coast FIRE Number at 40: How Much to Have Invested
At 40, an example saver needs about $295,303 invested to coast to retirement with no new contributions - and across real market history that plan held up about 83% of the time.
That's roughly what an example saver - $40,000/yr spending, a 5% real return, retiring by 65 - would need invested at 40 to stop contributing and still reach a $1,000,000 target through growth alone. These figures are computed at build time from Coastward's real-history engine, not hand-picked.
What coasting at 40 actually means
By 40 the coast number is materially higher, because growth has around 25 years to work instead of 40. Coasting is very much still on the table, but the margin for a poor first decade after you stop contributing is thinner, so the gap between the straight-line number and the honest, history-tested one starts to matter more.
The honest part most calculators skip: $295,303 is the straight-line answer. When we replay that exact plan across thousands of real market sequences - crashes in their true order - it reached retirement intact in about 83% of histories. A coast number isn't a guarantee, it's a probability. See how that's computed →
Run your own coast number at 40
Open the calculator prefilled for this example, then change the spending, return, and target to match your life - and watch the fan chart of real histories redraw.
Frequently asked
How much do I need invested to Coast FIRE at 40?
For an example saver spending $40,000/yr and assuming a 5% real return to age 65, the Coast FIRE number at 40 is about $295,303. Your own number depends on your spending, target age, and return assumption - run it in the calculator.
Is 40 too late to Coast FIRE?
40 is not too late to coast, but the numbers get more demanding: with roughly 25 years of runway you need a larger sum invested today, and there's less time to recover from an early downturn. That's precisely why the historical success rate matters more here than the single straight-line figure.