Hi, an update

[FinallyRetired]

Hello to everyone. This is an update to my situation maybe five years ago when I was contemplating early retirement -- at least early for me, when I was 56. This board and all of its posts and calculators helped me greatly to make the decision, but not to retire all at once. I scaled down, working part time at first, then working part time out of the home. I'm now nearing 62 and will have to decide whether to retire full time if I get my SS.

I've had success, and some surprises. The main success is that I was indeed able to execute my financial plan, but am glad that I used my judgement and kept the bulk of my retirement money in cash during the big market downturn. I'm still probably too much on the conservative side, but at least I'm still very much alive with my retirement plan. Another thing my wife and I did right is to get long term disability insurance, not that we need it, but with our parents nearing retirement home age we realize how expensive it is.

And that's one of the surprises, although we had planned for ourselves, we had not planned for our parent's needs should they need retirement home care. We're taking it a day at a time, but will probably have to do a lof of care ourselves rather than using a retirement home. Not a problem under normal conditions but we are hoping they don't need skilled nursing care.

Another surprise is that as much as I was looking forward to cutting back on work, and even though I am far from a workaholic, my work filled a lot of my time with interesting things, more than I can fill myself even with all of my hobbies. So I've stayed working part time and will probably continue to do so even though all the calculators say I don't need to.

Speaking of calculators, I don't trust that I've used any single one correctly,so have validated my answers with a number of them, and it's reassuring when the answers pretty well match. One of the latest I've downloaded is from a guy named Otar, the Otar Retirement Calculator a monte carlo one. It looks pretty good, though I'm still learning it and have questions. It's pretty cheap, at 29 and change, though not as cheap as the free ones here. Which have worked well, I just like to cross check my results.

Well that's about it, just wanted to reintroduce myself.