This week's person has the numbers. The question is whether they have permission to actually use them. The person: 30, single, no kids. Senior SWE at a Fortune 500 earning $180k in Boston. Deeply burned out, managing some mental health conditions, and running on fumes. The numbers: - Retirement accounts: $359k - Taxable brokerage: $72k - Cash: $56k - Student loans: -$10k - Net worth: ~$476k - Current expenses: $60k/year - The plan: Move to Southeast Asia, drop expenses dramatically, and pick up light consulting work — maybe 5 to 20 hours a week — while leaving the portfolio untouched to grow. The worry: AI disruption in tech makes stepping back feel risky. What if they can't get back in? My take: The Coast FIRE math is solid. $359k at 30 with 30+ years of growth is doing a lot of work already. And if living expenses drop to $25-35k in SEA, they barely need to earn anything to make it work. The AI concern is real but worth flipping around — if the industry is shifting anyway, burning out in a stack-ranking culture for two more years might not be the protection they think it is. Sometimes the spreadsheet says go before the person feels ready. Over to you: Has burnout ever been the thing that finally pushed you to make a move? Was the career risk as scary as you thought it would be?

Maybe you finally ran your Coast FIRE number for the first time. Maybe you had the conversation with your partner you'd been putting off. Maybe you just admitted to yourself that you're unhappy — which is actually a pretty big deal. This is the place to put it. We spend a lot of time in our heads with this stuff. Sometimes you just need to say it out loud to make it real. What's your win this week?

Leaving a well-paying job should feel like a win. Sometimes it does. But a lot of people hit something unexpected: guilt. For the career you spent years building. For even leaving at all when others would love to have that job. It's a weird thing to carry when you're supposed to be relieved. The guilt usually means something though. It points to what you actually cared about, the people, the work you did, etc. And it fades, but it's worth sitting with rather than just pushing past it.

Every week I'm going to break down a real budget scenario and we'll talk through whether this person is in a position to make a move — or what's standing in their way. Here's this week's situation: The person: 33 years old. Left a high-earning corporate career ($115k/year) to pursue more meaningful work, now earning $65-80k depending on overtime and side income. Planning to retire around 60-62. Will have a pension and likely Social Security, though they're hesitant to count on either. The numbers: - Saved: $316k in brokerage and retirement accounts (mostly S&P500 and broad ETFs) - Contributing: ~$1,100/month to retirement accounts - Retirement income target: $75k/year - Potential complication: wants kids in the next few years, which may reduce contributions considerably - The wrinkle: They ran their numbers through multiple Coast FIRE calculators and got completely opposite answers — some said they'd already made it, others said they had a long way to go. (This is actually a calculator assumption issue around how inflation is factored in, not a sign their math is wrong.) My take: At 33 with $316k already saved and nearly 30 years of growth ahead, they're likely closer to Coast than the pessimistic calculators suggest. The pension and Social Security — even discounted heavily — reduce the pressure on their portfolio further. The bigger open question is what $75k/year actually looks like in retirement after inflation, and whether that number has been stress-tested. Now over to you: Do you think this person has hit Coast FIRE? And what would you want to know before making a call either way?