Thanks Brian, I’m headed there now.
2 of us will travel: my wife and I.
As for bears, I’ll carry and sleep with a gun. Another poster here on the Dope says that shooting at the ground near them, but not at them, usually startles them sufficiently to run away.
For temp control, a fan in the heat, and good insulation in the cold should cover us for most climates.
My retirement is coming up in about six months. We are not only retiring, but moving a state away. So a lot of things will be happening at once. We’ll be having to sort out Medicare and advantage plans, how to restructure our investments to produce an income (without paying a fat fee to a CFP), house hunting, moving, finding new doctors at the new place, etc. We’d retire and then stay put for awhile here before moving to make it easier, but we’re still paying a mortgage and a high state income tax and our retirement income might not be up to the task.
So it’s on the horizon and it’ll soon get real. Whew.
I’ve thought for some time what I’d do in retirement. Travel. Perhaps take a college course. Read books. Volunteer as a docent and lead tours at my local history museum. Also, volunteer as a docent and lead tours at the local Moffett Field Museum. Take Voice lessons. Pick up the violin again (I played from 4th grade through high school — I learned using the Suzuki Method and I surprise myself at the pieces I can still scratch out from memory).
I’ve got plenty going right now with my church volunteer work. I’m currently the congregation president and my term ends in July. Between that and small projects at home I have enough for now, and I could take on more but I’m heeding advice and not jumping into new things just yet.
I plan to go to July as is, and then I’ll ramp down on my church work. I’ll always be involved at church, but not at this level, which has been a lot. We are between pastors and we are calling a new one, so it’s a critical juncture for my congregation. Fortunately we have many good people leading our efforts and it’s a good team, so the load isn’t falling on only a few.
Once I’m into July and August, I’ll figure out what I’ll add. I may also join my father-in-law, who is a volunteer up at the USS Hornet aircraft carrier museum.
Recent retiree here:
I thought I’d have to jump into volunteering or part-time work, just to give my life meaning. See, I grew up in a Puritan Work Ethic family, and all my life I heard people meet someone new with "So, what do you do?" (Not “Who are you?” or “What’re you interested in?”)
Also, I was a teacher, and pretty damn proud of it, and I’d get a certain amount of respect. It was certainly part of my self-image, and I was really worried I couldn’t just retire.
HA!
Woke up the next morning at 10, came down and took my coffee and the dogs and a stack of comic books out on the porch, and thought:
Whoa… I didn’t expect to be this good at Doing ‘Fuck-All’.
I just heard about an organization called Common Denominator, to help middle school students struggling with math. This might be something to get involved with.
(searches for them)
I just found them and they’re in NYC, not nationwide. But maybe something to leverage off of your teaching experience, or my tutoring experience. In my next life I’ll be a math teacher. 
A very real concern!
Our state income tax isn’t that bad - but we are in a high-priced area, housing-wise, and our mortgage is as low as it’s ever gonna get thanks to a timely refinance back in 2021. We could sell this place, and with the proceeds, pay cash for a place in most other parts of the country. We’d have trouble affording the mortgage based on what we expect to get from Social Security and our retirement savings - not to mention, this house is not conducive to “aging in place”.
A friend pointed out that our adventures in orthopedic surgery a few years ago (wrist surgery for me, knee surgery for my husband 10 days later… that was “fun”) were a very good trial run for how we’d age in this house. I don’t know that we’d want to move to an assisted living facility, even one that begins with completely independent living but then has step-up options, but I definitely want something with minimal-to-no stairs.
For those of you who retired well before Social Security kicks in, and well before Medicare is an option:
What kind of planning have you done to make sure you’ll have access to health insurance? What kind of planning have you done regarding your nest egg, to inflation-proof or emergency-proof your income stream?
I’m imagining something like “health insurance for me / us right now would be 1000 a month or 1200 a year, double that, and make sure I’ve got enough of that to cover the span until age 65”… “Enough in the 401(k) or IRA that the INCOME from it is enough to pay basic housing without dipping into principal”… “substantial long-term-care insurance policy in place”, etc.
My FIL and MIL retired when he was 65 and she was 62. They’d just received an inheritance that was enough to purchase a condo in a cheap area, and with the residual from that (and social security) they were doing pretty well for a bit (have vented about developments since then, elsewhere). They took a risk - MIL was too young for Medicare, and a medical emergency for her would have wiped them out faster and sooner than the one that ultimately did so. In hindsight, of course, her taking Social Security early did NOT work out financially - she’s lived past the “break-even” age by now.
A friend - same age (63 and a bit) as I am - who has been working and saving her entire adult life, and has never married / had kids - plans to retire some time after she turns 63 and a half - because she can COBRA her health insurance for the gap until Medicare kicks in. I haven’t asked about her plans for stuff like long-term care but I imagine she’s got something in place.
Numbers inserted.
Great questions! Those were our main concerns too.
(1) For now I am on my wife’s company policy. She is 57 and she wants to work for a few more years. Bless her heart, knock yerself out.
(2) This is the key question and it pretty much determines the when of when can one retire?
As we all know, Mama, there are no guarantees for what the future holds. But there are likelihoods. We’d all love to have guaranteed situations and outcomes, but the only guarantee is that we will die at some point. Our E ticket ride of life has ended and it’s time to get off. While it was a fun run, it is now over.
Ideally you want to have enough invested / saved so that you can live off of the proceeds generated by those investments. If you do, you can die with more money than you retired with, and that is whether you live for 15 years, or 45 years after retirement. This is an ideal scenario, and it is not achieved (or even achievable) by many people. I’ll call this Scenario X.
Scenario Y is to predict, or guess, how long you’re likely to live after retirement. How many years do your resources have to fund? How much do you need to live on for each of those years, and what is the inflation rate likely to be?
Whether you’re in scenario X or scenario Y, determine the amount your resources have to be worth to fund that scenario. Build in a buffer, a safety cushion, to protect against disaster possibilities, like the Great Depression — an extreme scenario, but still it could happen though it’s not likely.
First, accept the fact that there is no such thing as inflation-proofing or emergency-proofing your income stream. Again, it’s about likelihoods, not guarantees.
To have better likelihoods, be diversified. My heart aches for the Enron employees who had all of their retirement funds in their company. Learn from that.
Get rich quick schemes do happen, and bless those folks fortunate enough to have that happen for them, but, they are not likely to happen.
That’s my .02.
For me, my pension plan includes health insurance, so I am getting the same plan I had when I was working and I pay the same premium I was while employed. I would not have been able to retire early without it, and I do know how lucky I am. While I was pretty bored with my job the last few years, knowing I could retire early if I held on a little longer was a pretty strong motivator to stay.
For now I am just living on what I get from the pension and I will do that for as long as I can. I won’t be eligible for Social Security until early 2024 and hope I can wait longer than that to take it.
My husband is older than I am, so he gets his pension, Social Security and is on a Medicare Advantage plan provided by our pension plan (we both worked for the state, but in different places).
We aren’t touching any savings and don’t plan to any time soon, barring unforeseen events. We don’t have kids so we won’t have any unexpected expenses in that direction and the house and cars are all paid for.
That, I think, is the single biggest factor in whether someone can retire early! The two friends we have who are the same age, and truly retirement-ready, never had kids (neither ever married, either, for what that’s worth).
Retiree health insurance is becoming increasingly rare. My own employer, which had been pretty good for retirees, made changes a few years ago to eliminate anything like that (they actually DO have some assistance, in the form of money put aside each year for 10 years, that can be used to pay for a Medigap policy… if you meet strict criteria such as having been covered by some other group plan all the time before you retire).
I do worry somewhat about what we’ll do all day when retirement happens. I suspect that, as with my father, puttering around the house etc. will somehow expand to fill all our time, and we won’t feel like we have that much more “free time” than we do now!
Yes. My workplace eliminated it for new hires awhile back - it was getting so expensive they decided they couldn’t afford offer it anymore. Those folks will either need to save a whole lot more money, or wait until they hit 65 to retire.
In California you can get insurance on the exchange. It’s called Covered California and is our version of Obamacare. Premiums depend on income, not wealth. My income is low since I am living off of savings and most of my wealth is in home equity and retirement accounts. As such, my premiums are free.
I think that depends a lot on the details - my kids really weren’t a factor, but I had them young and didn’t take out loans for their college tuition*. The people I know for whom kids are a factor mostly had them when they were older than I was , so although we are the same age, their kids are in high school while mine are in their 30s.
Health insurance would have been a factor, but that comes with my pension.
/* I paid their tuition at the public university which didn’t require loans.
Interesting point.
We had ours in our 30s. We had sufficient assets to give both kids a free 4-year ride at in-state tuition rates; my son did actually do that. My daughter had different needs - and we spent her college fund (and more) on expensive therapeutic residential care. If both had graduated college and become self-sufficient on the same timeframe my husband and I did, we’d have been free of that by our late 50s - I certainly would not have felt comfortable retiring before that happened.
Both are special needs - so something we must take into account is the ability to provide SOME kind of support for them, long-term. That’s a fairly unusual situation though. I think that without that concern (and the aging, destitute parents) we’d be in much better shape to consider retiring “on time”. The parent situation will, well, likely resolve itself (though given both of their health issues, neither should have lived THIS long, and they might hang on another decade for sheer cussedness 
).
I do suspect that, on average, kids vs no kids is a significant factor in someone’s ability to retire early. Both the expense of raising the child, and of course career impact if you take time off work, or take a less-demanding (and lower-paying) job to be there for the family.
That’s exactly what I did, though the limiting factor was when my wife turned 65, since she is a writer who was on my insurance. I looked at Covered California but did not like any of the plans very much. COBRA was expensive but I got to keep all my insurance and my doctors.
As for income, we’ve all been told that we should buy index funds with good growth potential and low overhead. Which is good. But when you get close to retirement what we did was move to more stable dividend producing funds . I did not make nearly as much as I would have in an index fund, but it generates enough cash every year for me to live on with Social Security, and in fact it let me delay taking Social Security until I hit 70. So I really don’t care what the value of my portfolio is any more.
But you do need a buffer for things like new cars and trips. So that has to be factored in.
That’s actually supposedly good general advice - as you get closer to retirement, it’s recommended to rebalance your portfolio to lean more heavily toward bonds etc. versus more volatile stocks. “Target date” funds have that built in (I think I’ve got some funds in a 2025 target fund, for example).
Right now we’re still heavily weighted toward stocks - which has made the last 6 months or so a bit scary. I just try to ignore it and remind myself we’re in it for the long run.
A couple years back, I tried to take an annuity from the retirement money held in a 401(k)-like instrument from a previous employer. That money was all employer-donated, but we had to make investment decisions. And we have the option of taking it as an annuity, whenever we like (the value of which is determined at the time we convert it), or taking it as lump sum and rolling it into an individual IRA. But the process got stymied because they insisted that since I’m still with my current employer (who bought our division from the previous one), it would be financially disadvantageous to do that. They never provided me any further info, even though I asked, so I have no clue what the deal was / is. In any case, I haven’t looked at it since then, so I have no clue whether the value is higher now than it was then (this was at least 2 years ago), and thus, whether I should be really pissed at their delay.
I suppose the absolute monthly annuity amount is higher than it would have been, if only because I’m 2 or more years older. There is also, supposedly, a defined BENEFIT pension that would pay me about 250 a month starting at age 65 - apparently I had just qualified for that when the company did away with it. That’ll let us get brand-name beans and rice instead of generic, right?
Yeah, we’re trying to move from stocks to bonds… except for my one beloved tech stock, which is up a lot since I got it, BUT has been bouncing up and down like a… kangaroo on crack. (?)
But I will hang onto it over the long haul and try not to worry about it (thank you for the reminder). Yes, I do check it, but no longer multiple times a day.
When my wife asks why I don’t know the current value I say “Hey, you don’t pull up your plants by the roots to check their growth every day, do you?”
If it’s worth half of what it was last week, I haven’t lost any money, unless I sell it this week.
(And as a wacky tech stock, this could bounce back tomorrow, and go even higher next week… I’d go wacky myself, worrying about it).
All except your last sentence applies to me. I was stressed and going crazy at work. And our department was going to be outsourced, so I’d have been gone anyway. I still consider myself lucky.
My portfolio has some bonds, of course, but the things I’m talking about are stocks that traditionally pay good dividends. We’d call them widows and orphan stocks in the old days. They don’t move much, so you’re not going to make a killing, but they also don’t go down much.
I had some target funds in my 401K, but my understanding is that they have relatively high overhead, and I decided that I could balance my 401K holdings with my other holdings. But if most of what you have is in a 401K, they’re pretty good.
The only annuity I have is bought from money I got when I cashed out my AT&T pension, which was more than I expected when planning. Haven’t touched it yet. Not too happy with its performance, but it has a good death benefit, so there’s that.