When to retire? I think as young as you can afford it. Back when inflation wasn’t a big thing that was a lot easier to calculate.
I’ve heard that retirement is in three stages…
Go go: you’re young enough, healthy enough, etc. and you go go.
Slow go: you’re not as energetic, starting to have some health problems, can’t travel long distances
No go: better stay close to your team of doctors and rest.
I’d like to max the go go and slow go.
A buddy of mine retired at 52. His dad taught him how important saving for retirement was, and he took it to heart. He and his wife lived on his pay and banked every cent his wife earned.
So now he has three part time jobs just to keep busy, but it’s nice knowing that the moment any job is no longer fun he can quit.
What a treat that must be, being able to fire the boss!
from what I’ve seen the real issue with early retirement isn’t paying for living expenses, it’s health care.
being able to afford a few grand a month for living expenses is not what holds many people back from retiring at 55, it’s fear of major medical bills and losing insurance.
hopeful the ACA isn’t overturned anytime soon.
Part of the issue is what you do when you retire. And if you feel your work has value.
Even go go go people sometimes are actually spending lots more time just vegetating compared to when they were working. And that’s the path to becoming a disabled lump.
I was glad to find out I could keep my current insurance for 1% more than it is when I’m employed. I’m planning on retiring as soon as I’m eligible (or when the 24/25 school year ends, since I don’t want to leave the school without a librarian for half of the year). The pension isn’t huge, but with savings, profit from selling our house, and moving somewhere cheaper than the DC area it should be doable. I hope to be done with the daily grind at 60, and maybe work with kids as a volunteer (although I’d do it for pay if the opportunity presented itself).
Yup.
My Wife and I are 61. We will probably retire at 65 so that we have medicare. And, we will need to move closer to health care.
The other reason to move is the amount of snow we get. 20-30 feet a year is not something I want to deal with when we are 80.
We are struggling with where to move to though. Would like an acre or two, moderate climate and not a totally red state.
True. Some people may have a million in the bank but medical expenses could wipe that out. Unless you’ve won the lottery etc. it’s hard to feel 100% secure.
For some, sure.
I used to think I’d get bored in retirement but now that I’ve worked for a few decades… Actually once you have some money and start traveling, you can really catch the bug. It isn’t about going first class etc. There’s plenty to discover not far from where you are.
I hear there’s a huge demand for subs. Maybe you could do what you do, but do it less.
I don’t know if discourse has a provision or not, but it would be really nice if you could have a discussion under the poll if you could collapse it when you don’t want to see it.
The poll over in the other thread needs an option for “depends on the job and how you feel about it.”
If the job’s just a way to earn money: retire as soon as you can afford it.
If the work you’re doing is your heart’s desire: keep working until you drop in your tracks.
My assumption was that if you’re approaching retirement, you’ve been in the line of work or career awhile and that informs your choice. I know a woman who is a hairstylist; she has her own business, does it at home, charges a minimum of $100 for a hair cut and has plenty of customers. She said, “Why would I retire? I love what I do.”
But for those who change careers etc., it’s true that there could be more options. I think in Facebook, you can let the crowd help build the poll. So you could add that option. I like that because there’s always one I forget or whatever. I don’t think discourse can do it, though.
From what I’m seeing here, my link to the poll doesn’t go to quite the right spot now. I have to scroll down a post I do like the idea that tomorrow I could come back and read more comments, then think I should go back and see if more voted in the poll. By going back to the OP I have the link. Sometimes lots of polls get posted and it takes awhile to find what I’m looking for in there, so links could make that more efficient.
Ah. I took the question to be “what is the ideal age of retirement for people in general”, not “what is your personal ideal age of retirement”.
Do you mean the latter? If so, then I can vote in the poll.
I’ve been at my current place of employment for 30 years. My boss is retiring after 37 years. I don’t love it or hate it. I won’t though, leave my coworkers in a lurch. Some of the stuff I do is very specialized. Some of it needs to be recreated on newer applications. People always scream when you take away/change something that they have been using for ~15 years.
I think it’s rather pointless to try to train someone to manage all of my custom code that is getting very long in the tooth. It needs to be re-created using other tools. You don’t just keep throwing parts at an old car that gets a lot of use.
Yes, that. I don’t think I can edit the poll but if I could I’d separate that into “I’ll never retire because I love my job” or “I’ll never retire because I can’t afford to.”
A couple of decades ago a golfing buddy told me something that really made sense to me. He was retiring in his mid-50s and said to retire you need 3 things. You don’t need crazy amounts of any of the 3, but you needed some decent amount of each:
1 - you need enough $. You don’t need to be rich, but you don’t want to be pinching every penny and worrying about bills.
2 - you need to be decently healthy. No, you don’t have to start running marathons, but you want to be healthy enough to do what you want to do. Which leads to:
3 - you need some interest to fill your time. Can be anything - or any number of things. But you just have to have SOMETHING you look forward to doing, and to fill the hours, as you wake every day.
Sure - not revelatory or anything, but put things into a sensible perspective for me.
Personally, I’m 61, with 35+ years with my employer. Between my work savings plan, my pension, and eventual Social Security, not to mention personal savings and investments, I’m pretty sure I could retire and my wife and I could pretty much do whatever we wanted for the rest of our lives. (We’ve never been extravagant, and don’t have any really pricey “wants.”) But it is a HUGE step to go from INCREASING your nest egg, to DRAWING FROM it.
There is NOTHING about my job that I enjoy or derive satisfaction from, other than the pay check. And it IS a darned nice paycheck. Meanwhile, even when we go back into the office, I have only a 6 minute commute, and I work no OT. I have generous leave and great flexibility in using it. So I have the $ and time to engage in pretty much anything I want to do - which currently amounts to golf, biking, and music, and some travel.
So, while I COULD probably retire today, I don’t really HAVE to. And each additional year I work just adds to the nest egg and defers drawing from it, allowing me to be more generous to my friends and family and making my eventual retirement all the more comfortable and stress free. The main thing I needed to do was get my mind around being less emotionally engaged w/ my work, because that only caused stress. But stepping back a couple of steps, I could see doing this for some more years.
So I dunno. Right now I’m assuming I’ll work till full SS retirement - which I think is 67 or so for me. But, if things change drastically, it could be tomorrow.
I retired a couple of years ago at 56. I love it. I didn’t hate my job but it was super stressful. I miss a few of my colleagues but that’s about it. Fuck work.
Because I’m now “low income” I have fairly good health insurance through Covered California for free. I stay healthy by taking two Pilates classes a week and walking, riding my bike and dancing to live music.
My days are spent by going to an average of two concerts a week, hanging out with friends with benefits and regular friends and fucking off on the internet. I’ve been finally getting finished with fixing up my house (paying other people to do it) and should be done with that sometime next year.
I’m living a life beyond my wildest dreams.
That’s fine as long as you have a plan. What are you going to do when you retire? Or on the first day of retirement are you going to look in the mirror and say, “Now what do I do?” Or are you going to sit your porch and await death by drinking mint juleps all day? Or do you have a second career, a serious hobby, lots of social connections, travel plans? And enough money to pay for all of it? I had a high school buddy who made it big by founding a game software company and then selling it for a bundle, and retired in his 40s. He mostly races cars.
Health care was always a concern for me as I did retirement planning. Then my wife retired from her company after taking an early-out package, and that company provides group insurance to retirees and families, basically comparable to when she was an employee. It covers us until the kids age out at 26 and we are both on Medicare. Then they have an optional Medicare gap plan we can sign up for after that. So my wife retired in her 50s and I retired on my 64th birthday. OTOH my boss retired at 54 when he sold the company and now is looking for a job just so he has health care coverage until he’s eligible for Medicare, because doing it on your own is so expensive.
I think wait until the SS $ payments max out, as long as you’re enjoying your work and don’t need the soc sec cash. For people in my age bracket that’s 70.
My job was super stressful near the end. There were rumors* of the department being out sourced. My commute was 80 miles round trip. I’d get up at 4:00-4:30 am to beat traffic. Not get home until about 12 hours later. I was tired.
Fortunately, I had a lump sum that I was grandfathered into when the company got rid of its pension plan (converted it all to the 401K plan), plus I’d been contributing to the 401K plan since it had been started decades before. I don’t live an extravagant lifestyle, but I’ve never really scrimped either.
But the main thing is I could retire prior to 65, and the company medical plan would cover me (for about $80 a month, about $20 for dental) until Medicare kicked in. Then, they would cover the gap plan costs.
It was a no brainer.
Before the last two years happened, I would have said I wanted to keep working at least into my late sixties. Now, I really don’t know. I feel very aware of how quickly the world can change and how things that I want to do, like travel, can suddenly become impossible; and I also feel like my job as a college professor is a lot less fun than it used to be. (Some of the fun parts, like study abroad and conferences, are coming back, but for complicated reasons, I feel less “among my people” with other academics than I used to, and a lot more like … well, I kind of stumbled into this career and I can stumble out again.) Also, I figure the college-age population is going to hit a massive demographic cliff in 2038, when I’ll be 62, and my university might be just as happy if I went.
OTOH, three of my grandparents lived into their nineties and one of them made it to 100, so running out of money is a real possibility if I time it too early.
I retired at 62 that was 11 years ago. For some reason I figured that I would be slowing down in my 70’s. I was clueless about how active people are in their 70’s when it comes to dating. I had convinced myself that I would have a lot of fun for 3 or 4 years then just settle into working in my shop and playing on the computer. I went through my savings faster than I had anticipated and find myself a lot more budget conscious now. The opposite sex still has a lot more influence on my decision that I am comfortable with but I do feel that declining and welcome it!