Financial Independence with Business as Accelerator
nigelchua Coast FIRE is the point where what you’ve already invested will grow into your full FI number on its own, with no more contributions. Here’s the formula, a worked example, and the part coast calculators leave out.
Every FIRE calculator asks how much of your income you save. It never asks where the income comes from. A service business sits on one of six levels, and the level decides what it does to your date — at most rungs the business doesn’t count toward your number at all. Here’s the ladder, with what each rung is worth to you, to a buyer, and to your date.
The standard early-retirement formula — annual expenses divided by a safe withdrawal rate — has a hidden flaw: it treats every expense as permanent. Your mortgage isn’t. Leave a finite cost like a mortgage inside a “forever” calculation and you overstate your number, sometimes badly. Separate the expenses that end from the ones that don’t, … Read more
The accumulating and distributing versions of the same global index fund are identical underneath — same holdings, same costs. The choice between them isn’t a investing decision, it’s a mechanical one tied to a single question: are you still building, or are you living off it? Accumulate while you build, switch once when the payouts … Read more
When someone asks you to invest in or lend to their venture, the hardest part isn’t the analysis — it’s saying no cleanly, especially to someone close. The discipline is to evaluate it like any deal (upside, downside, security, operator), and then deliver a short no with no justification attached, because every reason you give … Read more
Setting up a trust doesn’t mean you distrust your children or your next generations. A lump sum left to them is already a trust — just a badly designed one: a single payout, no governance, no oversight, triggered by your death. The only real question is whether the trust you leave is written on purpose … Read more
Generational wealth is money and assets deliberately structured to outlast you — to reach your children and theirs with enough strength to compound rather than evaporate. Most people picture a trust fund. The truth is plainer: it’s the gap between a family that builds wealth once and a family that keeps it for three generations. … Read more
This year we opened clinic four. Clinic five was meant to open this month. As I write this, it’s only just starting renovation. Around the time clinic four opened, I wrote down a rule for myself: nothing new until both have at least twelve months of operating data. That puts the next expansion well into … Read more
When I raised prices this year, the default was obvious. Push every option up by the same amount. Put the full menu out. Let patients choose. That’s how almost everyone does it. I think it’s backwards. Three prices that point We price three session lengths: 30, 45 and 60 minutes. The 45 is the one … Read more
I’ve had a date in my head for years. Fifty. Not to stop working. The goal was never to stop. It’s to stop being forced to work for money. At fifty the obligation ends. The work I choose doesn’t. For most of those years I treated fifty as a money question. Hit the number and … Read more