When 30, What Age Did You Plan For Retirement?

[38Chevy454]

Just curious what age you thought would be for your own retirement, when you were 30 years old. I picked 30 since by then most are in a career path and done with education or training.


Myself I thought around age 60 for retirement from a full time job, and then would pick up some consulting or contract type work after that for another 5-10 years. I am glad that I did better and was able to retire at 53.5; along with no plans to do any additional consulting or contract work. In fact I am not going to keep my professional engineer (PE) license current any longer. Why pay the money if no plans to use it?

 

[RetireAge50]

Plan was 50 actual was 50.

 

[97guns]

I started my first real job at 26 and said to myself that I wanted to retire by 40 and thought it was pretty much a pipe dream, didn’t really think about it much after starting that first job but just saved as much as I could, around a 50% clip. Some how everything came together

 

[Texas Proud]

Funny, but I started to think about retirement when I was 15 or 16.... I had calculated how to save $1 mill by the time I was 55...

 

[NYEXPAT]

At 30, I never gave it any thought as I was making "crazy money". After the market crash in "87" realized I no longer needed to work (was on the cusp of 34).

 

[flintnational]

While dating in college, the future DW and I planned to retire at 55. The plan was still on track at 30. She and I both retired at 53, almost 54.

 

[Ed B]

At 30 my target was 55. This was based on our megacorp pension and early retirement eligibility. I was totally in the dark about investing at the time.

I retired at 58. I wasn't ready at 55 partly because of my early ignorance about investing.

 

[gauss]

Plan at 30 was to FIRE at age 55 to get 30 years of service and traditional retirement benefits.

Ended up resigning and FIREing at age 47 instead.

Pension accruals were frozen, retiree health care was scaled way back, ACA came online and the crazies were now running the asylum.

Parental care issues also were starting to come on strong. No Regrets!

-gauss

 

[gauss]

At 30, I never gave it any thought as I was making "crazy money". After the market crash in "87" realized I no longer needed to work (was on the cusp of 34).

Had you been buying Put options or otherwise "Short" going into 87?
Usually it works the other way around. Interesting story.

-gauss

 

[Number3Red]

My goal has always been 55. Unfortunately, it was more talk than action in my 20's and since only really getting serious about it in the last few years (age 37 now) it'll be a challenge, but I think I'm up to the task.

 

[FI_RElater]

thinking of Retirement?
at 30, not long after grad school... no such “visions”

at 40 even, couldn’t be sure it was even possible, but (now) “we” were doing what we could ...

 

[braumeister]

Plan since high school was 55. Made it.

 

[NW-Bound]

Just curious what age you thought would be for your own retirement, when you were 30 years old. I picked 30 since by then most are in a career path and done with education or training...

Had my first child when I was 30. Too busy to think about retirement. Did not even really plan for retirement when I reached 50. Just wanted to save and have a lot of money for financial security.

One day, decided I had enough hassle with work to more than offset the fun and money I got out of it. Walked.

 

[razztazz]

38. Did it on schedule

 

[mountainsoft]

I didn't think about retirement till I was around 35 years old. I opened a traditional IRA at the local bank in 1999, but only contributed around $1000 per year for the first few years. Retirement still wasn't something we gave much thought to, as we were focused on building our home so most of our spare money went towards that.

Over the next 10 years or so we slowly bumped our contributions up to $2000 per year, then to $3000 per year, then to $4000. Unfortunately, the fees and bad returns at our local bank made it feel like our account wasn't really growing. So retirement was more of a "someday" pipe dream than a reality. It didn't help that the bank made it nearly impossible to monitor our IRA or to make changes. Just to increase our contribution I had to mail them a letter, wait for a return, fill out their paperwork, and mail it back. After 15 years of saving, we only had about $64K saved up in the IRA.

Once I turned 50 I think it hit me I was getting older and should start getting serious about retirement. I still didn't have a date in mind, probably 65 as was customary, but that was just a wild guess. It was during this time frame that I found this forum and discovered I had options other than the local bank.

I moved my IRA to Vanguard where I could monitor and manage it easier, and maxed out my contributions to $6500 per year. At age 50 I was still thinking I would be 65 before I could retire. There was so much I didn't understand. In the last couple of years we have bumped up our estimated retirement age to 60 (55 for my wife). The situation could obviously change over the next five years, but at least retirement seems like a possibility now. The closer retirement gets, the more I find myself scraping every spare dollar I can to add to savings.

After realizing how much better off we would have been if we had saved earlier, I encouraged my daughter to start an IRA at age 27. She hasn't contributed much, but at least she's saving regularly. That's more than we were doing at her age.

 

[brett]

Never gave it a thought at that age. Too busy living and working.

I did not really think about a specific age until I was in my early 50's. Even then, nothing specific. It was more about being financially prepared should the day come-voluntary or involuntary.

 

[davebarnes]

Did not give it any thought at 30.
At 30 I was working for a great company, Digital Equipment Corp, and everything was wonderful.
I am not much of a planner. Life throws too many curve balls.

 

[pacergal]

At 30, had just had first child, went back to work and co worker talked me into participating in a new def comp program. Glad I listened! Back then, I figured I would be working until 65. It wasn't until about age 40 that I seriously started thinking and trying to figure out the financial side.

 

[Spock]

At 30 I believed there was no way I could ever retire.
Looking ahead to 30 years of working, I would need to earn enough for 2 people to survive those 30 years, plus another 30 years (with inflation) of retirement + supporting aging parents.

 

[Car-Guy]

I'm not sure I gave much thought about retiring when I was 30 but for years I had it in my head that I'd retire about 65. I probably didn't really start thinking seriously about when I might retire until I was in my early 40's. Finally, pulled the trigger five years sooner than I had expected with well over 3 times the NW I had projected. I had also planned to have enough money to comfortably take me to 100. You just never know, but I'm increasing my spend rate now since living to 100 is not going to happen, and last time I checked, I can't take it with me on that final trip.

 

[PatrickA5]

At 30, I figured I'd have to work until death. We were $30K in debt from credit cards, using cash advances from one card to pay the minimum on others. But, I'd always been interested in finance (I'm a CPA), so I knew what "needed" to be done, we just needed a plan. I retired at 50 from my megacorp job and DW continues to work part time. We were lucky in that we had decent jobs and never got laid off. I don't know how kids coming out of college with $100K+ in student debt are going to do what we did.

 

[Dawg52]

At 30, I told everyone I would retire at 40 knowing it was unrealistic and just joking around. In my early 40's I set 50 as a goal and I did hit the number I felt was needed. But worked another 2 1/2 years for a cushion.

 

[aaronc879]

At age 30 I was thinking no later than 55 to FIRE. Now at age 39 and after 3 hip surgeries including a total hip replacement I will never be able to work overtime in my manual labor job so my income won't exceed around $45K/yr so i'm thinking between 55-59 if I am very frugal and my health allows me to work that long.

 

[SecondCor521]

I turned 30 in 1999. At that time I know I already had a spreadsheet projecting my FIRE date, and it was about that time that I noticed that regardless of what the market did, my projected retirement date was never much past 47 or 48.

In 2000, I distinctly recall that the projected date had moved noticeably earlier than that...maybe to around 42 or 43. I liked seeing that projection but in my gut knew it wouldn't be realistic.

Hit FI in around 2014 and FIREd in 2016 at age 46.

 

[omni550]

At age 32 I started tracking my Net Worth annually and have done this ever since. Tracking my NW made me want to see it grow year-over-year, so I actively started saving and investing as much as possible. LBYM was my mantra.

As I didn't know anyone who had retired early, I really wasn't sure it was even possible for me. My dad worked until he was 70. My then-employer did not offer any early retirement plans. I just kept plugging away, saving and investing....and tracking my ever-growing NW.

Fast forward to when I got my first computer. One of the first searches I did was "early retirement"...and up popped John Greany's (aka intrcst) work. I was then hooked. I figured I should be able to retire at 58. So that became my goal.

When I was 56 and working at MegaMotors, they offered a severance package to most everyone in Product Development. I grabbed it and never looked back. Everyone at work was shocked as I only had 16.5 years of service. (People there usually didn't ''early retire" unless they had 30 years of service). What they didn't realize was that I'd been planning to retire early for a loooong time.

In the 11 years that I've been retired, my old bosses have called me twice to invite me to come back. I just laughed and said I was having too much fun being retired.

omni