FUEGO
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2007
- Messages
- 7,746
My dear wife finally joined us cool kids and retired two weeks ago. It's been a blast so far!
She's been working very part time the last six months (1-4 days per week with a week or two off once per month), so not exactly a drastic change in lifestyle from six months of semi-retirement (and she's had 5-12 week sabbaticals the past 2 summers).
Today we went out for a nice long leisurely walk through the neighborhood to the park with our 3 year old while the older kids were in school. After a week of near-freezing temps, the 60 degrees and sun felt great! It rained really hard this morning so our little guy was excited to see the stream almost overflowing it's banks with all the rain runoff. "So many waterfalls" as he says.
As someone on my blog commented, the Internet Retirement Police can finally get off my back and allow me to be retired, too. Phew - I was getting tired of "working" these past 2.5 years. Although particularly brutal Internet Retirement Police will claim that having a 3 year old means we won't really be retired for another 15 years till he's out of the house. For those people, feel free to call us "stay at home parents" for 15 more years. But I'll warn you, I don't plan on staying at home all the time.
As far as finances, we've been spending $25-33k per year the past 2 years including some working expenses. That's from a portfolio that's varied from $1.1-1.3 million (plus another $100k+ for the kids' college). Our goal this year is to increase spending to 4% of our portfolio, but after putting together a budget, I only got to $40,000 before I couldn't find anything else worthwhile to stick in the budget. Kids entering the teen years may take care of this "problem" for us.
She's been working very part time the last six months (1-4 days per week with a week or two off once per month), so not exactly a drastic change in lifestyle from six months of semi-retirement (and she's had 5-12 week sabbaticals the past 2 summers).
Today we went out for a nice long leisurely walk through the neighborhood to the park with our 3 year old while the older kids were in school. After a week of near-freezing temps, the 60 degrees and sun felt great! It rained really hard this morning so our little guy was excited to see the stream almost overflowing it's banks with all the rain runoff. "So many waterfalls" as he says.
As someone on my blog commented, the Internet Retirement Police can finally get off my back and allow me to be retired, too. Phew - I was getting tired of "working" these past 2.5 years. Although particularly brutal Internet Retirement Police will claim that having a 3 year old means we won't really be retired for another 15 years till he's out of the house. For those people, feel free to call us "stay at home parents" for 15 more years. But I'll warn you, I don't plan on staying at home all the time.
As far as finances, we've been spending $25-33k per year the past 2 years including some working expenses. That's from a portfolio that's varied from $1.1-1.3 million (plus another $100k+ for the kids' college). Our goal this year is to increase spending to 4% of our portfolio, but after putting together a budget, I only got to $40,000 before I couldn't find anything else worthwhile to stick in the budget. Kids entering the teen years may take care of this "problem" for us.