I have been retired for almost 13 years now. I have a good income, but my savings went down much faster than I expected. Hobbies and travel related to hobbies is where it all went, to be fair dating was a pretty close second. When covid hit my social life mostly collapsed along with my hobbies. I started sitting at the computer all day every day and not moving around. So now I am slowly trying to get back into decent condition.
One thing I absolutely love about retirement and free from the bondage of hobbies is the time I have to explore new things. I spent my life in industrial settings where everything had to be done right now. Now I can putz with one little facet for a month if need be. This is very rewarding when you find out what you can actually do when you are on your own.
I am afraid that I will just end up feeling useless and lose the motivation to go on. I don’t know if I even have the energy to find volunteer activities since my latest round of COVID has left me hollowed out with brain fog, fatigue and anhedonia.
I’ll keep trying though since I have no other choice.
I’m putting everything on hold for now to see how things pan out in the larger world.
IOW “Most of my money went to wine, women, and song. The rest I wasted.”
That’s sort of how it could be in my skill area for retirees from the Big Show.
The problem is there’s a significant fixed cost associated with each worker. One full-timer can do the work of e.g. 4 part-timers doing one week / month each. The savings of 3 fixed cost burdens by demanding the full timer instead of the others is too compelling for the employers to overlook.
Luckily I don’t drink but the rest is spot on. I wouldn’t change a thing and I plan to keep it going until I fully deteriorate. Fuck work.
Something else I like about retirement. I have told a lot of people including family members to go fuck off in the last year or so. I don’t have time to waste on petty bullshit and thoroughly enjoy exploring new ideas with creative positive people. Anyone who has a negative attitude I no longer deal with. Once I started doing this my life took a major turn and I have no intention of ever going back to being a nice guy who listens to everybody’s bullshit.
I blew off my siblings years ago and have felt pretty guilty about it since. They weren’t evil or criminal or anything, but they had a lot of negative drama. My sister was under-employed her whole life due to crummy choices she made for years, and my failure-to-launch brother developed into a full-blown hoarder. Both tended to use me as a free therapist and every phone call from them was me listening to their tales of medical or financial woes, or the woes of their friends who I had never met. I slowly stopped answering their calls right before I retired and my life improved quite a bit, except for that guilt thing I mentioned. But I’d rather feel guilty in my retirement than dreading the miserable phone calls.
I’m 7 1/2 weeks away from retirement. I’ve figured out that with teleworking 2 days a week and the holidays, I only have 17 more days that I have to be in my office. I really need to start cleaning it up. I’ve accumulated a lot of personal junk there over the past 27 years.
Congratulations
Thanks! I’m pretty sure that this has been the longest year of my life.
In the seemingly never-ending saga of transition to retirement and with a special shout-out to @teelabrown who had a bunch of issues when she did what I’m doing …
I’m now 15 months retired. Now that my divorce is done and my ex- has gotten her appropriate small slice of my 401k I can begin the process of transferring all that remaining money out of the brokerage my employer chose for our 401k plan and roll it all into my IRAs at my own brokerage.
So far it’s been pretty painless and it’s all going directly from one set of computers to another; no paper checks, no FedEx, no USPS. The bulk is also being transferred in kind rather than being sold then transferred as cash. The only real surprise was I thought I had all the money in in-kind transferrable assets, but there was one small holding in a fund that seemed to be publicly traded, but was in fact proprietary and had to be liquidated. Which adds a 3-day delay to that money being available to transfer and hence the transfer will occur in two bites.
But I’m now in that sorta nervous spot where 95% of the money has departed the 401k and 0% of that money has reappeared in the IRAs. I have faith in the process, but it’s still kinda weird to see a black hole where a bunch of your net worth used to be.
Come January I think I will have everything neatly arranged just as I want with no lingering connections to employer or to ex-. Even my Medicare, etc., insurance plans will no longer be influenced dictated by her druthers. Hooray. Just in time for Jan 20 and maybe some new changes. Sigh. It’s always something.
I retired at 56 so I had to wait until I was 59.5 to do that. It was definitely unnerving.
I’m surprised to hear that this is possible. I did the exact same thing about six weeks ago: moved my money from my former employer’s 401k into an IRA I had opened at Fidelity. My assets in the 401k were all in Vanguard funds, but I couldn’t do the transfer in kind. Rather, the funds were sold and cash was wired to my Fidelity account. I immediately purchased mutual funds with the cash, a couple of which were the same Vanguard funds that I had in my 401k.
Yup. There was, I believe, a 2-day period in which I had zero dollars in my 401k and only the original cash in my Fidelity IRA. But then all the funds showed up and life was good again. As @hajario just said, for a while it was unnerving.
As to in-kind transfers, that varies with the policies of the sending entity.
In my case the 401Ks (Trad+Roth) were at Fidelity and the money was all(see below) invested in publicly traded Fidelity-branded funds. Fidelity told me that a direct transfer of my 401K money to my brokerage would have to be in cash. But if I opened IRAs at Fidelity, that transfer could be in-kind. And transfers between an IRA at Fidelity and an IRA elsewhere can also be in kind.
So first I opened Fidelity IRAs (one Roth, one traditional), then I drained the two 401ks into the two new IRAs. Which all went in-kind and happened overnight with no delays and no temporarily disappearing money.
Then I ordered my own brokerage to request the rollover transfers from Fidelity’s IRAs to my existing IRAs. Which is when I discovered one of the supposedly tradeable / transferrable funds (FZROX for future reference) is not in fact transferable and had to be sold for cash. Of course I had some of that in both the traditional and the Roth side, so that meant two sales, not just one.
And just now while I was typing my own RIA called to tell me they can see the incoming in-kind transfers (Roth + Trad) and they’ll both land later today. So that 95% of the money isn’t lost. 
Yet. 
Once those sell-for-cash transactions settle in a day or two then Fidelity will send that last 5% of cash over and the monkey-motion will be done. Whew!
Me too. I believe you should be able to, if you desire, be admitted to a hospital and be put into a medically induced coma during that time period.
And insurance would cover it.
mmm
Just go on a disconnected vacation, sailing to Tahiti or climbing Pichu Pichu or something.
Something must absolutely be done to ease the discomfort of the wealthy with OCD in these situations.
Interesting! I guess I could have done that, but it’s all over now. And I’m pretty sure I won’t ever have to do this again.
Yeah. My post(s) were intended for future folks facing the same problem.
We each individually get to do this once; by the time we’ve developed expertise it’s too late to use.
You guys and your fancy shmancy rollovers.
I talked to a former co-worker about the withdrawal process from our 401K plan, which I’m guessing is similar to the rollover process and he said that you have to call them to request a form. They email you the form, you print it, fill it out and then snail mail it back to them. It takes a week to 10 days to get your money.
When I retire, I’m moving everything to Fidelity.
That’s the same thing I had to go through to initiate the transfer of funds. The 401k provider did let me know when they had received my form and started the process.