I “retired” over 15 years ago to be the stay-at-home spouse, which is obviously a different set of decisions.
My wife is retiring in June. There’s a longer post here if you are interested for some reason. Long story short, it was a much, much easier decision for us than for a lot of people (maybe most) for a few reasons:
- We’ve done a really good job of saving/living below our means. We just paid off the house, so we are entering full retirement completely, 100%, debt-free.
- My wife rose pretty far in the ranks at her firm, and so has had a substantial income.
- Being in lockdown for the last year gave us really good data as to our spending habits. I’ve been using Quicken for decades, so we can run a lot of pretty detailed reports. Once a month we have, “Finance Friday,” where we review the past month’s expenses and see how they will play in retirement.
My wife constructed a monstrous Excel workbook (it’s how she likes to think) to do a lot of analysis of our various retirement income sources, taking it out to age 100. Being conservative with those savings’ growth over the years, we should be able to slide smoothly into retirement without significant changes to our life. If something does go wrong, we’ve got a lot of fat we can trim on the expense side before things get even a little uncomfortable. We both grew up with very little money; we can pare way, way back if necessary.
COVID was a small blessing in that regard - we’ve had a year-long laboratory in which to play with simulating life in retirement.
If I were to offer anything resembling advice, it would be to get really, really good at tracking expenses. Like I said, I use Quicken, but I think even a free app like Mint has enough reporting functionality to do the job. Every morning I download the previous day’s transactions and categorize them, schedule any upcoming payments happening within the next couple of weeks, and just take a quick glance at our overall picture. As a bonus, this habit has let me catch any number of fraudulent credit card charges before they snowballed into huge amounts of money. It may sound like a lot of work to some people, but once it’s part of the morning routine, it’s pretty easy; it’s maybe 10 minutes out of my day on average.