37 and Hopeful

[Cool_Sparrow]

Folks,

What a great community and boy, am I delighted to find it! I am in a sort of a unique situation and need your insights. I am 37 year old immigrant (naturalized US citizen), married (spouse not working currently but used to) and have a 2-year old. We have ~$600,000 saved for retirement (2/3rd of it in taxable accounts but in tax-efficient index funds and low turnover funds), with roughly 75% equities (rest in bonds/cash) - About 34% of my investment portfolio is international. In addition, we have about $100K for our child’s college education (all in index stock funds, 65% US, 35% int’l). We don’t own a home anywhere in the world. However, we have investment real estate in Asia (which serves as a hedge against our purchase cost of a future home there), where we hope to retire by end of this year. As excited as I am about “retiring” early, there is a fear in the back of my mind of whether I have thought everything though…. My specific questions are:

1. Are my retirement assets sufficient to support $2000/month in Asia, which should give us a comfortable (but certainly not luxurious) lifestyle once home is fully paid for (we hope to sell investment real estate and put the proceeds into a home)? I am worried if the inflation rate in Asia is higher than U.S. and I am forced to withdraw more from my asset base (especially in later years when gainful employment become difficult). What %age of my retirement assets should I keep in the currency I intend to spend in from the next year?

2. Should I include Social Security in the above calculation? My wife and I both are vested at the minimum (40 quarters), and projections indicate that even if we don’t contribute a penny from 2009 into SSA, our monthly benefits (present dollars) at age 62 are $600 for me and $500 for my wife. Given that this represents a sizeable chunk of my retirement expenses, I am eager to know if I can count on SS coming through in my later years (Wife and I are 25+ years away for early eligibility at 62).

3. Have we saved enough for college education for our child? Not knowing what our child will do when he grows up, we would like these funds to cover either his 4-year undergrad education in U.S. or 2-year U.S. graduate education (assuming he does undergrad in a low cost but decent school in Asia, which we can cover within our monthly expense budget).

Health care is inexpensive where we will be retiring so we are less concerned about it, but we have earmarked a modest $10K for it in case so we don’t dip into the retirement asset base.

How does the above sound? Is there an obvious “oops” somewhere or any other issues that you can help me think through?

Thanks a ton!