Your Barista FIRE number
How much less you need to retire when part-time work covers part of the bills — plus the 2026 health-insurance math most calculators skip. No sign-up, no gated number.
PROJECTION INPUTSinflation 3% · real growth 6.8%
Fine-tuning for the projection — your portfolio compounds in real (after-inflation) terms.
What is Barista FIRE?
Barista FIRE is the halfway house between working full-time and never working again. You save enough that a modest part-time income — plus eventual withdrawals from your portfolio — covers your spending. You're not fully financially independent, but you've bought your way out of the full-time grind, often decades early.
The name is literal. It comes from the FIRE community's go-to example: working enough hours at a company like Starbucks to get subsidized health insurance and a small paycheck, while your investments quietly keep compounding. The “barista” part was never really about coffee — it's shorthand for any part-time job that covers some bills and, ideally, throws in benefits.
The number above is your Barista FIRE number — how much you need invested once part-time income is doing part of the work. The rest of this page explains the two ways to think about it, the healthcare question that makes or breaks the plan in 2026, and how it compares to the other flavors of FIRE.
Barista FIRE on the FIRE spectrum
FIRE isn't one finish line. It's a spectrum of how much you save and how much work you keep. Barista FIRE sits in the friendly middle — less saved than full FIRE, but unlike Coast FIRE, you're already stepping back from full-time work.
The key contrast is with Coast FIRE, which it's most often confused with — more on that below.
How to calculate your Barista FIRE number
Start from the full FIRE number — annual spending divided by your safe withdrawal rate, or 25× spending at 4%. Barista FIRE just subtracts the part of that spending your part-time income will cover:
Worked example. Say you spend $50,000 a year and expect to earn $20,000 part-time. Full FIRE would need $50,000 × 25 = $1.25M. Barista FIRE only needs to cover the other $30,000: ($50,000 − $20,000) × 25 = $750,000 — 40% less to save before you can walk away from full-time work.
| Part-time income | Barista FIRE number | You save vs. full |
|---|---|---|
| $0/yr | $1,250,000 | — |
| $10,000/yr | $1,000,000 | −$250,000 · 20% |
| $20,000/yrexample | $750,000 | −$500,000 · 40% |
| $30,000/yr | $500,000 | −$750,000 · 60% |
| $40,000/yr | $250,000 | −$1,000,000 · 80% |
| $50,000/yr | $0 | −$1,250,000 · 100% |
At $50,000 of annual expenses and a 4% withdrawal rate. Every dollar of reliable part-time income removes 25× that dollar from the portfolio you need to build.
The healthcare question (this is the whole game)
For most early retirees in the US, health insurance is the single biggest variable — and it's exactly what the original “barista” framing was solving for. There are two ways to cover it, and the right answer changed in 2026.
Employer benefits. A handful of large employers offer health coverage to part-time staff — historically Starbucks, Costco, REI, and UPS among them. If a barista job comes with a subsidized plan, the value can rival the wage itself: employer coverage can be worth $7,000–$15,000+ a year to a household, and it sidesteps the marketplace entirely.
The ACA marketplace. If your part-time job has no benefits, you buy your own plan — and here, low income is an advantage. Premium tax credits scale with income measured against the federal poverty line (MAGI ÷ FPL). A barista-FIRE income is often low enough that subsidies cover most of a Silver plan — which is why the calculator's healthcare toggle estimates your real, subsidized cost rather than a scary sticker price.
What changed for 2026 — read this carefully. The enhanced subsidies from the ARPA / Inflation Reduction Act expired on December 31, 2025. For the 2026 plan year, the ACA reverts to its original structure, which means two things matter again:
- The 400% FPL cliff is back. Earn one dollar over 400% of the poverty line (≈ $62,600 for one person in 2026) and your subsidy drops to $0 — you pay the full premium. Staying under the cliff is a real planning lever.
- The 8.5% cap is gone. The top expected contribution is back to 9.96% of income; there's no longer a flat ceiling on what you pay.
- Below ≈138% FPL, you may land in Medicaid instead (it varies by state).
A bill to extend the enhanced credits passed the House in January 2026 but is not yet law. If it's enacted, the cliff softens and these numbers improve. The calculator uses the rules as they stand for plan-year 2026 — toggle healthcare on to see your estimate, and always confirm an exact figure at HealthCare.gov.
The hard part isn't the formula — it's watching your real net worth climb toward it for years. That's what the FIRE Projection app is for.
Barista FIRE vs. Coast FIRE
These two get mixed up constantly, because both involve “enough invested to stop grinding.” The difference is what you do with your time.
Coast FIRE means you've invested enough that, left untouched, it will grow into a full retirement by your target age — so you stop saving but usually keep working full-time to cover today's bills. Barista FIRE means you've saved enough that part-time work covers the gap — so you cut your hours now. Coast frees your savings rate; Barista frees your calendar.
They differ in what comes next: with Coast FIRE you stop saving and keep working full-time; with Barista FIRE you downshift and let part-time income cover part of the bills. The projection above models that downshift honestly — you save until your chosen age, then the gap between spending and part-time income is drawn from the portfolio each year. If you want to run the pure Coast case in depth, use the Coast FIRE calculator, or the “when can I retire?” tool for the traditional-retirement version.
Who Barista FIRE is for — and who it isn't
It fits people who want out of full-time work sooner than full FIRE allows, have a path to enjoyable part-time work (ideally with benefits), and don't mind some income still flowing in. It's especially strong if that part-time job solves healthcare.
It's a weaker fit if your earning years are nearly behind you, if reliable part-time work is hard to find in your field, or if you'd resent any obligation to work. And there's a real risk worth naming: sequence-of-returns risk. Retiring (even partly) into a market downturn is dangerous, but barista income is a natural buffer — a part-time wage means you withdraw less from a falling portfolio in exactly the years that matters most.
- Walk away from full-time work years earlier than full FIRE.
- Part-time income cushions early-retirement market drops.
- The right employer can solve healthcare outright.
- Lower stress, kept skills, social structure, purpose.
- You're still tied to a job and a schedule.
- Benefits and hours can be cut at the employer's whim.
- Less saved means less margin if plans change.
- Part-time income raises MAGI — and can affect ACA subsidies.
How the math works
Two models, one answer. The headline barista number is rate-independent arithmetic; the projection compounds your portfolio in real (after-inflation) terms. Every figure is a field you can change.
- Barista number = (expenses − part-time income) ÷ SWR. Healthcare, when enabled, is added to expenses.
- 4% default safe withdrawal rate — the Trinity Study baseline; a 25× multiple.
- 10% nominal growth / 3% inflation (≈6.8% real) for the projection — matching the Coast sibling for cluster consistency. Dial it to 7% for the conservative case.
- The plan (3 phases): the projection compounds your portfolio with your annual savings until your chosen downshift age, then runs three phases — barista (part-time income offsets spending), the gap years (part-time has stopped, Social Security hasn't started — 100% of spending is drawn), and Social Security (a real, COLA-adjusted stream that offsets the draw from your claim age). Each year withdraws spending minus that year's income; the line bends at every transition.
- Social Security is treated as a real annuity in today's dollars from your claim age to the horizon — it never invests, it only reduces the draw. Toggle it off to see the bare-portfolio case.
- Social Security is haircut to 70% of your stated benefit, reflecting the projected ≈2033 trust-fund shortfall — the same conservative default as the FIRE Projection app. Dial it to 100% to assume benefits are paid in full.
- ACA: 2026 plan-year rules — 2025 FPL table, the 400% cliff, the Rev. Proc. 2025-25 sliding scale. Pre-tax, today's dollars throughout.
Full method, sources, and edge cases: FIRE Projection methodology →
Indie builder of FIRE Projection. I keep these tools' assumptions current with the research and the law — including the 2026 ACA changes — and show my work. No email wall, no gated number.
Educational, not financial or tax advice. Markets don't deliver a steady return, sequence-of-returns risk is real, and healthcare law is in flux — the enhanced ACA credits expired at the end of 2025 and a House-passed extension is pending but not enacted as of June 2026. ACA estimates ignore your local premium, age, tobacco use, and Silver cost-sharing loading. Confirm coverage costs at HealthCare.gov and use this to frame the question, not as a plan to act on without advice for your situation.
Size the number here. Live with it in the app.
This page does the barista math — part-time income, the 2026 healthcare estimate, the coast projection. The app does the other half: it tracks your real net worth against your FIRE number over time, so you can watch the gap close month by month and pressure-test the plan.
- Net worth vs. your FIRE number — track every account against the target, over time.
- Social Security, valued properly — net present value, with a benefit-cut haircut.
- Baseline vs. scenario — compare two plans side by side, live.
Straight talk: the app has no part-time-income lever and no healthcare line — that math lives here, on this page. The app is for tracking and stress-testing the number once you have it.
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