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Great story...I've heard of many people moving to the Villages and liking it. Congrats and hope you remain healthy a long time!

I think what you are feeling is normal. What we did was create a "safety buffer" number mentally, and if investments fell below that...we'd stop the splurging. For example, let's say you have $1.58M now, and feel like you need to have at least $1.2M by the end of 2024 to keep the FIRE life...

An LED light bar, no cord…that I can use for home repairs or working on our cars. The days of those old incandescent lights in a cage that got hot and burned you are over!

I do our planning. We just went through our 3rd estate planning iteration. Part of that was "letter to my surviving spouse", which we each wrote to the other. Within that I gave a 1 page summary of how she should manage finances. Fortunately I have a younger brother who is good with things...

Thank you. My MIL wants to be buried, so seems like not an option for her. We have done extensive estate planning for ourselves, so not an issue for us. I even know what jewelry she wants to be wearing when she passes lol. We did our first estate plan at ages 34/37, and we've done two...

We are waiting to collect until 70 so that we can do Roth conversions. We don't need the income at the moment. I don't have any data to support this, but I would think that if you only had the minimum number of quarters to qualify, then not working from 62 to FRA would make a moderate sized...

I don't avoid them if I can get a reasonable premium. What's reasonable? Well, there's no firm answer for that. I'd estimate we have about 40 CDs or T-bills currently and over the past year maybe 3 have been called.

That's awesome! You really whipped that original goal...was that mainly due to a good market or did you contribute a lot more than anticipated or what?

What is the advantage to using Neptune versus just doing it with a local funeral home? Also, do they ONLY handle cremations? When I did a Google search, it all seemed to focus on cremation.

One enters $3.8M and the other enters $.2M. :laugh: That was a joke! Yes, numbers seem sensible to me. Doesn't give much detail such as breakdowns by age etc.

I echo this thinking. We are in a similar situation and for us the big factor is whether we do Roth conversions now or not due to the following factors: 1) Doing Roth conversions (at least at any meaningful level) would cause us to lose about $9k in ACA subsidies. 2) However, if we DON'T do...

The above. You say you plan to give him advice, but did he ask for it? And will he follow it? If the answer to either of those is no, then I'd back away. The advice I'd give would be to sell the house and rent again at a much lower rent amount...or buy a much less expensive house.

Yes I would lock it in! We went through this with our rental properties several years ago. Re-assessments went up significantly and the city said "If you show us what you charge for rent, we will use a formula to calculate assessed value based on that and you can pay the lesser of the two."...

Not sure if I can easily list the top 10, but the top 5 are easy... 1) Taxes 2) LTC insurance 3) Property taxes 4) Groceries 5) Restaurants Travel/fun would normally be on there, but due to a very old MIL we have been staying near home a lot lately.

Although many of the MM funds are paying over 5% today, that may not be true by the end of the year. I hold mine in FZDXX at FIDO as some above have stated. Would you rather have a floating rate starting at 5.2% and possibly going down to 4% by end of year? Or would you rather buy a...

+1 IMO he focuses on a certain slice of consumers, those who are in debt and have not had a lot of financial education or discipline in their life. He has turned around a lot of people. I certainly don't agree with everything he says, but I think his methods have made things a lot better for...

+1 If someone finds it and adds a few digits to the front of the number, it may become a $9,930 problem instead of a $30 problem. Yes I know they'd also have to write in the "wording" line the number...but there are some sneaky ways to alter a check. For the peace of mind, I'd stop payment.

I changed my job on LinkedIn to "retirement specialist".

No, although I keep lots of liquidity and a relatively low % in equities at all times

Have you considered tax-free munis?

I've had a few CDs called recently, but most were going to mature in 2-3 months anyway.

Congrats, keep chucking money in!

I was faced with a similar decision, but I took the annuity. Why? I wanted longevity insurance for at least our basic living expenses. We have other funds on top of that, but the non-COLA'd pension annuity (when combined with COLA'd SS for both DW and I) gives me a floor that I'm comfortable...

I copied/pasted this from their "notice". It appears you'll get that interest payment on the last day of February. "Interest Payment Dates Last calendar day of August and February"

I agree with you, but there was a story on NBC TV today about a new trend of solo travel.