My wife and I plan to pick a different city in the world every year and go live there for 3 months. Rent a big enough place so friends and family can come and visit us there if they want to. Get to know the local area, the local bar, local cafe, and the culture and the people. After the 3 months are over come back to our home in the US. I plan to continue serving on a few boards that I am currently on, to stay current on markets, business, etc. Research were we want go abroad the next year. Keep doing that until either of us isn’t physically able.
Or not. There’s absolutely no guarantees. Especially if you get hurt doing any of those physically demanding things.
Correct. “More likely” does not equal “guarantee.”
Just like in your retirement portfolio: all investments come with risk!
Heh. I feel much better about my long term investments, pension, etc. than I do about the reliability of my body. Some people get Ferrari bodies - pretty sure I was dealt a Hyundai.
A Hyundai never driven all year probably doesn’t work as well as one taken out on the highway occasionally…
Unfortunately I didn’t pick my parents particularly well 
Yep, my father, whose own father lived to be 97 against all odds and whose mother lived to be almost 92, had every expectation that he would live into his 90s as well. So he was a relatively conservative spender, didn’t really travel much until after he retired, etc.
Then he planned a long-awaited trip to Italy with my stepmother, and one of the stops was to be the Ferrari factory. He never made it there, though - he had what turned out to be a mini-stroke toward the beginning of the trip, and eventually decided to cut the trip short and go home because he wasn’t very mobile, so he didn’t see the point. Then COVID hit, and my stepmother was one of the first victims. After 3 years of near-isolation, Dad finally had a hip replacement, and while he was rehabbing from that, he complained of fatigue and shortness of breath, which the doctors all pooh-poohed, saying that he was a 79-year-old asthmatic who had just had a hip replacement, so of course he was fatigued and short of breath.
The cause turned out to be a 20-pound malignant abdominal tumor. Dad had a very aggressive surgery (because he didn’t want to die, and his other option was painkillers and home hospice). After months in various health care institutions having one complication after another, during which he only even got out of bed a handful of times, he finally opted for home hospice, and was gone in a few months - and said he wished he had decided to go home sooner.
My lesson from all of this? Live more like my maternal grandparents. They traveled, but in a budget-friendly way, for as long as they could and as often as they could. Grandmom, when told she needed a knee replacement in her 70s, knew she was unlikely to regain full mobility, and took one last trip to Paris. She outlived her knee replacement and died shortly after her 98th birthday. And her passing was totally in a manner of her own choosing; her mind was largely gone by then, but the morning after her 98th birthday party, she looked at the nurse in her memory care facility, said “I’m finished!,” and by evening she was in critical care hospice and never regained consciousness.
Will I die wealthy? Probably not, but then I don’t have kids or grandkids to leave it to anyway. If I outlive Tom_Scud, I plan to leave anything remaining to nieces, nephews, and one old and dear friend who will be in charge of rehoming my cats.
My body is a Lexus at least. My teeth are an Edsel.
My son works from wherever he happens to be and no one has any way of finding out where that is. His job is to visit companies that are takeover targets and do due diligence on their claims. Pre-pandemic, he would visit in person, but has been zooming for the last four years. He mostly lives in Seattle, but snowbirds in California and is coming on Monday to visit for four weeks and will work here in Montreal without telling either the Canadian or Quebec government. He has done it overseas too. The company he works for is in the Seattle area.
And going along with “Go-go, go-slow, no-go” is a graph that shows how much you’re likely to spend in each of those three phases. “Go go” spending will be high, doing those fun things you always wanted to do once you retired. “Go slow” is calm years, not spending much, just maintaining your life. “No go” is when expenses ramp up at the end of your life, mostly due to health care issues.
Graphing spending versus years - high then low then high - results in a bathtub or U shape. It comes from a recent article in Nerd Wallet.
The retirement spending U is really more of a retirement spending smile if you are at the comfy end of things.
Folks who bought and maintained a good Medicare supplement plan find that late-in-life medical expenses go up, but not catastrophically. Said another way, their consumption of medical care goes way up, their insurance company’s spending on their behalf goes way up, and their OOP is pretty much the same as it always was.
OTOH, folks who got a crappy supplement plan, or none at all, or opted for Medicare Advantage instead learn in their dotage about all the things their crap insurance won’t pay for so now they get to. Their medical consumption goes up, their insurance shrugs at most of that, and they shoulder the costs or suffer without the care.
Is Ski Fast, Take Chances, Leave a Good Looking Corpse a valid retirement strategy?
The last part was ruled out a long time ago …
It was never on the table for me.