I wrote my previous tax planning post in December to summarize all of the deep thinking I had been doing on which tax buckets we would be drawing money from in retirement.

The thing is…I kept thinking. Long after I optimized our FIRE plan, I kept running scenarios. What if we didn’t get a mortgage? Rent vs mortgage? Moving to Baltimore now vs at FIRE?

My degree is in math, and my skill set in my career revolves around math modeling. Naturally, I’ve built some masterful models for our financial plan. And then one day in January, I was having a crap day at work, dreaming about Baltimore, both my spouse and I had had recent health blips that made us feel old and vulnerable, and I thought – what if we quit our corporate careers today?

The models did not fail.

I built another one – just to run it from a different angle (like how 5*4=20; a check would be whether 20/4=5)

Did not fail.

I found 3rd party validation using this: AARP Calculator

Results: You need to save $0.00 per month to meet your retirement needs.

This plan does include us taking part-time jobs that align with our passions. My spouse loves running, and he has talked about being able to work at a running store in retirement. The models include us generating $40k/year – so either part-time jobs for each of us, or one full-time minimum wage job will do the trick.

This FIRE variety is called: CoastFIRE

CoastFIRE is a retirement strategy where you save your retirement nest egg up front (DONE, whoa!) and then do not touch your portfolio, and let it grow in the market. Since saving is no longer necessary, employment is scaled back to only cover annual expenses.

Some people in the FIRE community don’t believe CoastFIRE counts as FIRE since there is still a job being done for money. But it really fits the bill for what we see for ourselves in the future! We read through the 100 Reasons to FIRE post, and realized that we didn’t need to wait to align our life with those intentions, we could do that NOW! Incredible!!

We are super excited. Big changes on the horizon for us.

In April, we will list our condo for sale.

In May, we have a trip out to Baltimore booked to tour apartments.

I’ll write more often to document this exciting year of transition! More details to come!