19 October 2026 · Journal
Coast FI on a Cornish wage
Coast FI says your existing investments could grow to your number by a chosen age if you never added another pound. It says nothing about whether you should hand in your notice, and nothing useful at all if the spending figure was borrowed from someone else's city.
A letter arrived last month from a couple who both work in Newquay, one in a school and one in a hotel that lives and dies by the season. They had seen a coast number online, divided a London rent by a 4 percent rule, and felt behind before they had finished their tea. The number was not unkind. It was simply about a different household.
Start with spending you can point at. Housing in a coastal town can eat a local wage even when the national "average rent" looks manageable. Council tax, a car because the bus does not do the shift, and a winter when hours fall are part of the sum. If you would still pay those bills on the day you called yourself independent, they belong in the annual spending figure. A holiday you would cancel does not.
Say that honest figure is £26,400 a year. At a 3.5 percent withdrawal rate the independence number is £754,286. At 4 percent it is £660,000. Pick the sterner one if a bad first decade of retirement would push you back into work you no longer want. The household maths page will rerun this with your own inputs. The arithmetic is ordinary. The honesty is the hard part.
Coast is that independence number pulled back to today by a real return you are willing to assume. If you have 25 years and you assume 4 percent a year after inflation, you divide by 1.04 raised to the power of 25. That factor is about 2.67, so a £660,000 target wants about £248,000 invested today and then left alone. The same target at a 3 percent real assumption needs more like £274,000 already sitting there, because 1.03 to the power of 25 is about 2.09 and the pot is not asked to work as hard. Change the years, the rate, or the spending and the coast figure moves. That is the point of calling it an assumption.
A coast label that only survives a cheerful return is a mood, not a milestone.
What the label does not do is end your working life. You may keep contributing. You may change hours. You may discover that the spending figure was a fantasy the first winter the roof needs doing. In the UK you may also still want earned income for National Insurance years so that a State Pension forecast is not a surprise at 67. The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week in 2026/27 if the qualifying years are there. It is a large number to ignore and a reckless number to treat as guaranteed in its present shape.
Housing sits beside this, not inside it, unless you choose to put it there. A paid-off house in Cornwall is a lower bill and a large, illiquid asset. A rented flat is a bill that inflation will revisit. Neither choice is the moral one. If your coast number assumes you will still be paying today's rent in 25 years, say that out loud. If it assumes the mortgage will be gone, the overpayments or the final lump sum have to appear in the plan as well, or the assumption is smuggling.
Seasonal income changes the emergency fund before it changes the coast figure. A hotel winter is a reason for a thicker cash rung, not a reason to raid the ISA in February and call it a rebalance. The coast sum only counts money you can leave alone for the years you typed in.
If you want the feeling of the path without the false precision, walk the coast and then come home and write three numbers on paper: the spending, the rate, the years. Cross out any number you took from a stranger. What remains is yours. The reader paths are composites of letters like that, not case studies with a product at the end.
General information only, written at 16 Sweet Briar Cres, Newquay TR7 2JP. Not a personal recommendation. Clinkanteyoio is not FCA-authorised. [email protected] · +44 7457126650.