Push and Coast

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure for more information.

Earlier this year, I had a post detailing how I cut wood for 30 days straight. Here’s one of the pictures from that post. It shows the workbench portion of my project after the 30 days.

Since that 30-day challenge, Mrs. Groovy and I jetted off to Australia for a month, and I casually enhanced my storage/workbench project when we got back. Nothing crazy. Just an hour or so of work every couple of days.

Well, in six months of casual carpentry, you’d be amazed at what can be accomplished. I certainly was. Here are a few pictures of the storage/workbench project today.

The Push-Coast Strategy

Now don’t ask me why, but I decided to dub my approach to my storage/workbench project as the push-coast strategy. You go like gangbusters for a short period of time in order to build a solid foundation, and then you coast, leisurely building upon that foundation. The results of this approach are truly remarkable. And the more time that lapses between the push phase and the coast phase, the more remarkable your results get.

The Push-Coast Strategy Applied to Personal Finance

What if we applied the push-coast strategy to personal finance? What would it look like?

To see what it might look like, I came up with a hypothetical 18-year-old who is really driven. From 18 to 22, he or she goes like gangbusters. Here’s what he or she does to build his or her financial foundation.

Push Phase (18 to 22)

• Live at home
• Work 50 hours a week at $10 per hour
• Go to community college part-time
• Save $833 per month
• Cash flow community college

Results

• No debt
• Associate degree in digital marketing
• $40,000 in savings

With the push phase completed, our hypothetical go-getter would then settle into the coast phase. Here’s what that might look like.

Coast Phase (23 to 67)

• Use $10,000 to rent a small apartment, get said apartment furnished, and establish a modest cushion (i.e., a one- to two-thousand-dollar emergency fund)
• Invest the remainder of the savings ($30,000) in a total stock market index fund
• Contribute $275 a month (one third the monthly savings rate during the push phase) to said total stock market index fund

Results

Assuming an average annual return of seven percent, our hypothetical go-getter would have…

• $48,103 in his or her index fund at age 25
• $143,411 in his or her index fund at age 35
• $330,898 in his or her index fund at age 45
• $699,714 in his or her index fund at age 55
• $1,425,229 in his or her index fund at age 65

Not too shabby for busting one’s butt for four years and then coasting.

Keys to the Push-Coast Strategy

The main key to the push-coast strategy is a willingness to suffer for a relatively short period (i.e., two to five years). If you can devote most of your waking hours to work and wrangle a super-cheap housing arrangement during your “sentence,” so to speak, you can save a ton of money.

The other keys to the push-coast strategy are your age and your level of support. This way of building a sturdy financial foundation works best for those who are young and have an incredibly sympathetic collection of friends and family. If you’re middle-aged and married with a couple of teenagers, the push-coast strategy is probably not for you. Spouses and teenagers are notoriously uninterested in living like a monk.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Is my push-coast strategy to personal finance something novel and worthwhile—especially for young people? Or is it a needlessly spartan scheme that should be shunned with extreme prejudice? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.