Why I Quit My Full-Time Job and Downshifted To Part-Time Work in Higher Education

How to calculate your Coast FI number, and my quit story

Photo by Rahul Pandit on Unsplash

I quit my full-time job a year ago. I woke up on May 6th, my first day of no longer being a full-time employee, feeling so much lighter — and here we are, one year later, and I feel so lucky to experiment with The Retired Millennial while being employed part time.

I used to be a full-time software engineer, but not a high earning one (mostly because I didn’t want to live in Silicon Valley, even though I had a job offer at one of the world’s largest software companies in SF before graduating). The prominent sector hiring software engineers in Monterey, CA was and still is the US Department of Defense…meh.

Why I Quit

I quit because I felt uninspired, unchallenged creatively, and unaligned with the whole package; from the sector down to the tech stack.

When I learned about early retirement in 2020, I knew that I wanted to quit software engineering, but I didn’t know I’d do it when I was 30. Then the end of 2021 happened and I become convicted about how I should spend my time.

Part 1: Existential Angst

In Fall 2021, 6 of my family members passed away in a tragic car accident, and my tech lead passed away around Thanksgiving. Any time someone I know dies, it’s impossible not to ponder your own mortality, but this time it was different.

I was working from home because of the lock down, so having my tech lead pass away felt like someone died in my home. It was such a weird feeling, and all we got was like a three sentence email, and nobody brought it up in any of the meetings. It made it feel so eerie.

I couldn’t help but ask myself if how I was spending my time was something I would be happy with if something tragic and unexpected were to happen to me. I realized very clearly that I did not want to die a software engineer, so that meant that I should no longer continue to live as one either.

I became very aware like I never have before about the brevity of life. I grew up in an ultra conservative Christian family and environment, so I am familiar with almost every Bible scripture about the brevity of life, “Teach us to number our days,” “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away,” “our days on earth are as a shadow,” but that head knowledge never translated to making decisions about how I spent my time.

I knew that I needed and wanted to spend my time differently. 

Part 2: Short & Long Term Reserves

I had a 6 month emergency fund and had reached Coast FI, so I felt like I had the best safety net to make a radical career change, and give an alternative lifestyle a try.

For me, that was about $12,000 of an emergency fund, and $150,000ish+ invested at age 30.

While my brain wanted me to wait until I was at minimum to half Lean FI ($300,000 for me) before I quit my full-time job, my heart said that Coast FI + and Emergency Fund were more than enough to make the move.

I was in a financial position to move down to part-time work so I could experiment with my own creator business. 

Part 3: Plan B + Odyssey Plan

I was contributing part-time to an organization that helps students land careers in tech as a curriculum developer, and the option for more hours was on the table. They had offered me a full-time role and offered to match my SWE pay, which I did not take because the job role seemed like 3 jobs in one. I had worked for the org full-time before, and knew I didn’t want to do my old job + more.

When I was thinking through my options, I came across this Lifestyle Design video by Ali Abdaal where he explained Odyssey Plans, which is essentially three different 5 year plans, and he described them as one where you do what would please your family, one where you do what pleases society, and one is where you do what pleases you.

This framework gave me the permission to be able to choose a pathway where I can pursue things that bring me energy, and work on problems I care about.

Instead of going all in on content creation, I thought it’d be wiser to work part-time and get more strategic with my content — and here we are!

I asked if I could take the role part-time with benefits, and they said yes! It’s the role I was doing spare time as a side hustle while I was working as a SWE full-time, but for 30 hours a week.

I had a part-time job in line that checked all of my boxes off. 

Dancing With Luck

Considering my part-time job doesn’t exist anywhere else, I definitely feel like I got super lucky with it. I also feel lucky for going viral after I quit because I was able to grow my audience (I went from 20k to 220k), which means I can make money off of brand deals now. Earlier I mentioned that I declined a lucrative position in SF in 2016, well guess what happened as a byproduct of that decision? I met my fiance in 2018. I feel lucky to have met someone like him, and it honestly feels like we were made for each other.

Every radical decision I’ve made has been rational and spiritual/emotional, where if I don’t do it, I just feel super uncomfortable, but once I make the leap, I feel such a peace of mind not only because it always makes sense mathematically (I have enough to fund my needs + some wants + emergencies), but because the fruit of the decisions is always SO MUCH BETTER than I could have imagined.

There’s enough luck out there for everyone, you just have to be willing to dance with it a bit. Take the first step and it will follow.

Have you gotten quiet to hear how your mind and body want you to use your time? How could you use your unfair advantages now to take one step towards that vision? Is it possible that the pain in your life is somehow waiting for you to make the first move so it can bring something beautiful?

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What is Coast FI and How Do I Calculate it?

There’s no way I would have felt 100% peace-of-mind without my emergency fund and my Coast FI nest egg. Let’s break down what Coast FI is.

FI stands for Financial Independence, and FI is a financial milestone where your passive income can cover all of your expenses. Coast FI is an early milestone on the way to FI.

Financial Independence Number (aka retirement number) is 25 or 33 * your retirement annual expenses. So let’s say you want to retire with $60,000/y in retirement, then your FI # would be $60k x 25 or $60k x 33, + a buffer.

$60k x 25 = $1.5M + a 5%-20% buffer (if you want a 30 year retirement)

$60k x 33 = $1.98M + a 5%-20% buffer (if you want a 30+ year retirement)

Coast FI is when you have enough money invested such that you don’t have to invest a single penny more and it will compound to your FI/retirement number by retirement (in my case age 65). Some people refer to it as savings optional, since retirement is taken care of. Since I’m trying to retire early, I continue to aggressively invest, but it was a great safety net to make a career change decision.

So to know if you’re currently Coast FI or not, you need to see if your current investments (not included real estate equity) can compound to your FI number by your retirement age.

You can use any compound calculator for this, I use the IRS Compound Calculator. You can use 5-7% as an after inflation number, and input your current investment balance with $0 as monthly payments. If your total number in X years is your FI number or more, then you’ve reached Coast FI.

Alternatively, you can use THIS Coast FI calculator to see how long it will take you to reach Coast FI.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!