I am Cato, for the most part a lurker and will probably remain so until I retire. I am 63yrs and DW 60yrs, kids mostly independent (Mmm, are they ever fully independent?). We will have a small (actually minute) pension, but living in Canada, the medicare (warts and all - I work in healthcare ) is nice to have and alleviates most of the concerns about healthcare expenses down the road.
DW has been retired for 10yrs now and I have been plugging away, adding to the retirement pile and I have penciled in next year June as a good time to retire and move. Investments are in two lots, with about 75% in a professional corporation and the rest in a taxable account. AA about 60:40 EQ:FI with about 2.5yrs of expenses set aside in a HISA @ 2%. The dividends/interest stream of about $150k pa before taxes, should allow us to live quite comfortably with a margin of safety. We spend about $90K a year (approx). Equities are heavily tilted towards bluechip dividend payers. We own two properties and will sell the one when I retire and add that money (about $650K) to the pile and move away to a condo – which has a mortgage of about $41K and will pay that off in Aug of this year.
Some might ask ( I enviously read about members who retired at 50-55yrs) why not retire right now – the problem is that at this moment in time, I am paid obscenely well for what I do and it is difficult to let go when your retirement savings visibly grow each month, you do not have the benefit of a COLA’d pension and you still carry scars from the market collapse in 2008 – in short, fear rules and I might as well ride this tiger until I’m ready to get off. Once I’m off, I’m not getting back on again.
The winters are getting to me and I will be snowbirding – it is more a question of where now. I love to travel and there are a lot of places I haven’t visited yet in North America. This ties in well with my hobby of video-editing – I never thought it would become so popular but YouTube seems to have given it a tremendous lift and the phenomenal increase in raw computing power has made it easy today compared to 1995 when encoding video from raw video to MPEG2 took about 10 times longer and DVD writers started coming out at $2K a pop.
So, I raise a glass to the class of 2012.
DW has been retired for 10yrs now and I have been plugging away, adding to the retirement pile and I have penciled in next year June as a good time to retire and move. Investments are in two lots, with about 75% in a professional corporation and the rest in a taxable account. AA about 60:40 EQ:FI with about 2.5yrs of expenses set aside in a HISA @ 2%. The dividends/interest stream of about $150k pa before taxes, should allow us to live quite comfortably with a margin of safety. We spend about $90K a year (approx). Equities are heavily tilted towards bluechip dividend payers. We own two properties and will sell the one when I retire and add that money (about $650K) to the pile and move away to a condo – which has a mortgage of about $41K and will pay that off in Aug of this year.
Some might ask ( I enviously read about members who retired at 50-55yrs) why not retire right now – the problem is that at this moment in time, I am paid obscenely well for what I do and it is difficult to let go when your retirement savings visibly grow each month, you do not have the benefit of a COLA’d pension and you still carry scars from the market collapse in 2008 – in short, fear rules and I might as well ride this tiger until I’m ready to get off. Once I’m off, I’m not getting back on again.
The winters are getting to me and I will be snowbirding – it is more a question of where now. I love to travel and there are a lot of places I haven’t visited yet in North America. This ties in well with my hobby of video-editing – I never thought it would become so popular but YouTube seems to have given it a tremendous lift and the phenomenal increase in raw computing power has made it easy today compared to 1995 when encoding video from raw video to MPEG2 took about 10 times longer and DVD writers started coming out at $2K a pop.
So, I raise a glass to the class of 2012.
