Christine Ji

Sat, Jun 14, 2025, 10:40 AM5 min read

• Corey Forsythe achieved financial independence in January and finished saving for retirement at age 35.

• Forsythe prioritized living a frugal lifestyle to maximize his investable income.

• He grew his initial nest egg with a risky investment in a satellite company.

In January, 35-year-old Corey Forsythe stopped making automatic monthly contributions to his retirement account.

After eight years of saving and investing, he said he hit $1.125 million across his investments in index funds, stocks, and a 401(k) retirement account. By his calculation, it was enough to fund $120,000 a year in retirement starting at age 60.

Forsythe, a pharmacist, has reached Coast FIRE, a subcategory of the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, meaning that he's saved enough for retirement and can now let his investments grow on their own while he focuses solely on covering his other expenses.

"Coast FIRE always reminded me of when, in pharmacy school, I would try as hard as I could at the beginning of the semester so that by the time the final exam came around, I only needed to get above a 20% or 30% on the test," Forsythe said. "That's how I view Coast FIRE, try really hard and invest as much as possible so that later on you can coast and enjoy your life while you're still young enough to."

At the beginning of his Coast FIRE journey, Forsythe aimed to invest $500,000 of his earned income relatively early in his career, which he broke down into a 70/20/10 split. He would allocate 70% of that $500,000 to a mutual fund tracking the broader stock market, 20% of it to an individual stock pick, and keep the remaining 10% in a cash emergency fund.

After reaching his $1.125 million Coast FIRE goal in January, Forsythe has been putting his extra money into a savings account to build up his cash reserves. His total holdings across accounts have grown to surpass $2 million, documents viewed by Business Insider showed.

While Forsythe certainly followed conventional Coast FIRE tactics such as living frugally and investing regularly, a key part of his success can be attributed to a single so-called YOLO bet — defined as an aggressive, high-risk strategy where an investor dedicates a large chunk of their portfolio to a single trade.

Forsythe made his YOLO bet on AST SpaceMobile (ASTS), which he first came across on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets in 2022.

The stock has a niche following on Reddit and X, dubbed the "SpaceMob", which Forsythe has been monitoring along with company news and earnings reports over the last few years.