Coast FIRE is the point where you can stop adding new money and still retire on time. Your existing investments keep compounding on their own and arrive at your retirement number without another dollar of contributions. You still work, you still pay your bills — you just stop saving for retirement.
Enter three numbers in the calculator above — your age, what you have invested, and what you want to spend each year in retirement — and it shows your Coast FIRE number straight away. There is no “calculate” button to press, no account, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Your Coast FIRE number is the amount that, left completely alone, grows into your full retirement target by the age you pick. Reaching it does not mean you can stop working. It means the retirement portion of your saving is done, and everything you earn from that point only has to cover the life you are living now.
For a lot of people that is a more useful milestone than full financial independence, because it arrives a decade or two earlier and it changes real decisions: taking the job you actually want, dropping to four days a week, going back to school, or starting something of your own.
Here is what this calculator returns for someone who wants $60,000 a year in retirement and plans to stop working at 65. The retirement target in every row is about $1.01M — only the years of compounding change:
The gap between 25 and 45 is roughly $246,000 on an identical retirement. That is the entire argument for investing early stated as one number: waiting twenty years does not cost you twenty years of contributions, it costs you twenty years of compounding, and compounding is the part you cannot buy back later.
Your own figure will differ. Retirement age moves it more than anything else, which is why the age slider sits right under the result — drag it and watch the number move.
Most Coast FIRE calculators are built on the American 4% rule and quietly assume your portfolio funds all of your retirement spending. In Canada that overstates what you need, often badly.
CPP and OAS are inflation-indexed income for life, starting at 65. Every dollar they cover is a dollar your portfolio does not have to. This calculator works out both from your own numbers and subtracts them before sizing your target — rather than asking you to guess your own CPP entitlement, which is what the other Canadian coast calculators do. If you retire before your benefits begin, it also prices the bridge years in between, when your portfolio is carrying the full cost alone.
The other Canadian Coast FIRE calculators ask for between six and nineteen inputs — including your expected monthly CPP and OAS — and hide every result behind a Calculate button. This one answers from three fields and updates as you type.
Everything else is optional and lives under Fine-tune your estimate: your expected return, inflation, housing situation, custom CPP and OAS figures, and the tax treatment of TFSA versus RRSP withdrawals. Defaults are shown on screen, never hidden, so you can see what you are being assumed to be before you decide whether to change it.
Reaching Coast FIRE does not mean your money is safe or that you should stop investing. It is a projection built on an assumed average return, and real markets do not deliver averages — they deliver good decades and bad ones in an order nobody gets to choose. A long stretch of poor returns early on can put you behind a number that looked settled.
It also says nothing about the years before retirement. Your emergency fund, a home, your children's education and your day-to-day life are all still ahead of you and still need funding. Coast FIRE retires one line item from your budget, not the budget.
This calculator is one step of a connected tool. The same figures flow into your take-home pay, a budget, TFSA, RRSP and FHSA projections, your net worth and a full retirement timeline — so you can go from “here is my Coast FIRE number” to “here is the contribution that reaches it, and here is what it does to the rest of my money.” Change your salary later and every one of those updates at once.
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Coast FIRE is the point where your existing investments will grow into your full retirement number on their own, without any further contributions. You keep working and covering your living costs, but you no longer need to save for retirement. It usually arrives many years before full financial independence, which is what makes it a useful milestone to aim at.
Take the retirement portfolio you will need, then discount it back to today at your expected real rate of return over the years until you retire. The calculator above does this from three inputs: your age, your current invested balance and your target annual retirement spending. In Canada the target should be reduced by the CPP and OAS income you expect, which this calculator works out for you.
For someone wanting $60,000 a year in retirement at 65, this calculator puts it at roughly $224,200 invested today. At 25 it is about $180,900 and at 40 about $344,500, against the same retirement target of roughly $1.01M. Your own figure depends on your spending, your retirement age and your expected return, so run your own numbers rather than relying on an example.
Yes, and leaving them out is the most common mistake in Canadian Coast FIRE maths. CPP and OAS are inflation-indexed income for life from 65, so every dollar they cover is a dollar your portfolio does not need to produce. That lowers both your retirement target and the Coast FIRE number behind it. This calculator estimates both from your own numbers instead of asking you to supply them.
Not necessarily. Coast FIRE is a projection based on an average return, and real markets deliver good decades and bad ones in an order nobody chooses. A weak stretch early on can put you behind a number that looked settled. Most people treat it as permission to ease off or to take a lower-paying job they prefer, rather than as a reason to stop entirely.
Regular FIRE means you have enough invested to stop working altogether. Coast FIRE only means you have enough that you can stop contributing to retirement — you still need income to cover your current living costs. Coast FIRE arrives much earlier, and it is the milestone that actually changes what work you are free to take.
More than anything else on the page. The number is discounted over the years between now and retirement, so each extra year of compounding lowers what you need today, and retiring earlier raises it sharply because there are fewer growth years and more years before CPP and OAS start. The age slider sits directly under the result so you can see the effect immediately.
Yes. Everything you enter stays on your device. Nothing is sent to a server or stored anywhere else, there is no account and no login, and you can wipe everything at any time with the reset option in the app.
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