Lean, Fat, Coast, Barista: which FIRE number are you actually chasing?

FIRE — financial independence, retire early — compresses to one yardstick: save roughly 25 times your annual spending (the flip side of the "4% rule") and paid work becomes optional. But "retire early" means very different things to different people, which is why the movement split into flavors, and why two people can both be "doing FIRE" with numbers a million dollars apart.

Regular FIRE is the baseline: save aggressively, retire well before the normal age, keep roughly your current lifestyle. Everything else is a variation on the number or the exit.

Lean FIRE buys the same freedom on a deliberately small budget — 25× a bare-bones $25–40K a year of spending, reachable much sooner. The trade is slack: little room for lifestyle inflation, big medical bills, or kids. Freedom bought with frugality.

Fat FIRE is the opposite trade — retire early without pinching, funding a generous lifestyle with no budgeting anxiety. It takes a much larger pile, often $2.5M and up, so it usually means a high income and a longer runway. What it buys is the removal of the "can I afford this?" question entirely.

Coast FIRE is the quiet one, and the most misunderstood: you stop having to save because what you've already invested will grow into your retirement number on its own — but you keep working to cover today's bills until then. Coasting means you stop contributing, not that you stop working. The pressure valve opens years before the money is reachable, which is exactly why people find the idea so appealing and why it's worth computing honestly. (The Coast FIRE calculator on this site finds the age your current balance starts coasting.)

Barista FIRE is the halfway exit: leave the demanding career, keep light or part-time work — the name nods to a coffee-shop job for the health insurance — so the portfolio only covers the gap, not everything.

None of these is correct. They're points on a spectrum between how much you save, how you want to live, and how completely you want to stop working. The useful move isn't picking a label — it's setting your own spending and timeline and checking whether the money actually lasts, including the parts the slogans skip: the years before your retirement accounts unlock, what Social Security actually contributes, and the odds a bad decade of returns breaks the plan.

Model it with your own numbers

Reading about the strategy is the small piece. Tesserae models the whole thing — every account, taxes on withdrawals, Social Security, Roth conversions, RMDs, and the odds your money actually lasts. Privacy-first: you enter your own numbers, and we never touch your bank login.