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.

A YOLO stock bet

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.

Combining insights from the online community and his own research, Forythe said he built the confidence to buy 35,000 shares of the stock at $2.88 apiece in 2024. It amounted to a roughly $100,000 wager on ASTS at a time when sentiment was overwhelmingly bearish.

The stock is now trading around $39, bringing Forsythe’s ASTS holding to more than $1.2 million — and he says he hasn’t sold any yet. He acknowledges the investment was a massive risk — and that other people shouldn’t treat his good fortune as a replicable model — but it did work out well for him.

Balancing student loan repayments and investing

Another unconventional strategy Forsythe employed was not prioritizing paying down his student-loan debt right away.

“I have a lot of friends who are still trying to pay off their loans as fast as possible, even going as far as still living at home,” Forsythe told BI. “After paying them off, their net worth was zero.”

To Forsythe, it didn’t make sense to forgo stock-market returns to pay off his loans faster, particularly when early investing years are key to harnessing the power of compounding.

Forsythe’s strategy has been to pay off the minimum required balance while still prioritizing investing in the stock market. He’s enrolled in the Pay As You Earn repayment plan, which requires him to pay 10% of his discretionary income monthly, which comes out to around $950. After 20 years of qualifying payments, his remaining student loans will be forgiven.

Frugal living

Coast FIRE wasn’t just the product of a risky, well-timed stock bet. Forsythe lived extremely frugally after graduating from pharmacy school.

“I kept living like a college student,” Forsythe said. “Keeping fixed costs under control is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated FIRE tools.”

Being a single person with a six-figure pharmacist income definitely made budgeting more straightforward for Forsythe. His monthly budget hovered around $3,000. Other than student loan repayments, Forsythe’s biggest monthly expense was his $750 mortgage payment; he had snagged a 625-square-foot condo during the pandemic and locked in a low mortgage rate.

Forsythe credits his low housing costs as one of the biggest factors that allowed him to invest aggressively in his brokerage account tracking the stock market. During his high-saving years, he invested between $42,000 to $50,000 annually.

“All of the money that I’m earning now, I can just put away, use for travel, go to concerts. I’ve started to live life a lot more instead of being frugal my whole life,” Forsythe said. “It’s allowed me to have less stress at work because all I need to do is cover my living expenses.”