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I’ve been lurking around this website for quite a while and thought I should finally register. I think this is a great board; I’ve learned a lot from it. I started reading here a couple of years ago after I had walked out of a faculty meeting, sat down at my desk, and - in desperation - googled “early retirement”. I read a lot, collected data, worked on numbers for a while, and discovered, to my everlasting joy, that early retirement was a real option.
I have to be a bit coy about my situation, as I’m a mid-50's professor planning to retire in about 3.581 years. (But who’s counting?) As soon as the people I work with know that I’m leaving...well, my political pull evaporates and things get even less tolerable.
My retirement will be financed with a mix of some bonds, a good dose of equities (mostly index funds) and a TIAA annuity fund in which I was enrolled decades ago. I plan to take the latter out over 10 years in “substantially equal periodic payments”. We’ve also got two houses, one in town and one in the country. Don’t take this as meaning wealthy - both are modest and bought before prices skyrocketed in my region. Our area is growing at an absurd pace and the houses have appreciated substantially. (I know...this is likely to end soon, but I think housing costs around here will stabilize and then simply grow at a sane rate.) On retirement, we plan to sell the house in the city, live in the country place for a while, then sell it and move to a small town we’ve identified. Housing is not appreciating rapidly in our target town and we expect to make much more selling our current houses than we will need to buy a place where we’re moving.
Before I encountered this board, my financial strategy was a combination of “What, me worry?”, dumb luck in real estate, and - most importantly - having a firm attitude (shared with my wife) that we should live below our means.
Anyway, there it is. Long-winded, but I guess that goes with my profession...
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