Were expenses what you thought after you retired?

[W2R]

Do you mind sharing a range on how much HVAC costs were? I'm looking at 11year old system and am trying to save for replacement.. Just not sure what an approx target might be. Thank you!

Frank and I each had to replace our entire HVAC, except some of the ductwork. Each of us have 1500 sf homes. We used the same company.

Mine cost $7,200 and his cost $7,800 because he needed more work on the ductwork than I did. My AC was a 3.5 ton Carriere, and his was a 3.0 ton Carriere. I have no idea why his was smaller than mine. There must have been some reason or other, because both of us are very happy with the results.

 

[Koolau]

My expenses have actually turned out to be much less than I anticipated because I now have the luxury of time to scrutinize and reduce every one of them.

Except for health care, as others have already pointed out is becoming an increasingly ridiculous line item. For instance, I just learned today that despite our paying over $500 a month for premiums a colonoscopy and upper GI scope (performed at the same time by the same doctor at the same surgery center) would cost me $3200 out of pocket because our deductible is $6,050 per individual.

They really need to fix that.

Wow! That must be one long tube to do them at the same time. Sorry. Just messin' with you. But seriously, before MC my HI suddenly went from $5K deductible total for both to $5K each. Since the basic plan was provided by my former Megacorp, I had not choice but to accept it (finding new HI in open market at the time would have been problematic.) Now with MC and supplement, our overall HC bill is much more manageable. Of course, we haven't stressed it yet (nothing major, thank the good Lord.) YMMV

 

[daylatedollarshort]

Correct budgeting for expenses is key to being able to live the desired lifestyle upon retirement ....and that is why we wanted to see what the folks here at ER think of our estimated budget.

Thank you for the feedback - much appreciated.

Any other advice or pointing out area's of concern(s) would be welcomed.

gamboolman & Ms. gamboolgal.....

I am not exactly sure what kind of advice you are looking for from posting your budget. If you want to compare your budget to what other retirees spend in general in the U.S. you can compare it to the Consumer Expenditure Survey:

https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm

The bad news for us was we did that and we were kind of shocked at how much more we were spending than most households, even for a high cost of living area. The good news is we realized we had a lot of opportunities for improvement and didn't need to save any more - just optimize our expenses.

 

[Scuba]

Thanks Scuba for the feedback. Regarding our expenses and history - This site is great for us - as we are expats living/working in Africa and have not been home except for a couple months per year in the last 15ish.... years, thus we have not been "living" in Texas for a long time.
Getting to read, discuss - and learn from and with other folks who are at similar stage/time of life is invaluable to us.

I did not include that we own our home and have put new roof, new AC's, new kitchen and appliances, new fences, sheds & outbuildings, new flooring and cabinets in recently and all paid for to try and get major expenses done & dusted prior to retiring.

Our adult son is living in our home pursuing post grad degree's and working - until we retire and then he'll move out to his own place. So that is how we have been able to keep our home while not being in it for 10 months per year.

Thank you for the comment on - Health care. We will continue our Medical/Dental/Vision/ insurances from megacorp in retirement. We have doubled our cost for the budget. We may need to bump it up some more - we will likely do so in our budget.

We are planning new vehicles - his & hers....upon retirement - but this money is set aside and not included in the budget or expenses. For vehicle maintenance - we based our number on a lifetime of fixing the kids cars.....You are correct in that our estimated maintenance costs are probably too high for just Mom and Dad. I guess this could be some conservatism/contingency.

I also did not include that we have run our expense numbers with Firecalc grossed up to account for Taxes and with a 3% inflation factor. We are getting 100% for 30 years. So that is encouraging.

Correct budgeting for expenses is key to being able to live the desired lifestyle upon retirement ....and that is why we wanted to see what the folks here at ER think of our estimated budget.

Thank you for the feedback - much appreciated.

Any other advice or pointing out area's of concern(s) would be welcomed.

gamboolman & Ms. gamboolgal.....

The other thing I found useful to do is to sort our expenses between non-discretionary and discretionary to figure out what amount could easily be reduced if need be. In our case, about 45% of our budgeted spending is discretionary (travel, eating out, live shows, gifts, wine, etc.). This helped give us confidence that if something went wrong we could cut our spending pretty easily. Wouldn't want to do it permanently but could for example take less expensive trips in years when the market isn't generating as much for us.

Healthcare is probably the single biggest uncertainty. Great that you have megacorp coverage. Wish we had that option.

Sounds like you have planned well. Not sure how old you are, but you may want to run Firecalc for a longer horizon than 30 years. We both planned for life expectancy of 95 even though it's unlikely. Also you could run your numbers through Fidelity's Retirement Income Planner tool for another check on likely outcome.

 

[gamboolman]

Thanks for all for the feedback as it really helps us since we have been living oversea's basically full-time the last ~15 years - it helps us to see that we are in the ballpark and have not missed any big items.

We really appreciate all the responses.

 

[socca]

What do you you and the Forum think?

The 2nd largest item in my budget is diversion to reserves for future aperiodic expenses (#1 is income taxes). The fact that you've recently paid some of these doesn't eliminate the need to include them in your budget so that such future expenses are covered.

As others have mentioned, some of your numbers look rather high, so I suspect that you can still hit your $10k/mo number even if you include a diversion to reserves line item just by reducing some of your other estimates.

 

[Ally]

Ours is about as expected, expect once we got Medicare and got in my husband's Medicare advantage plan through his state pension, our medical costs are nearly zero. We were surprised to find there is no copay for doctors, tests, lab work or X-rays. We haven't paid anything out of pocket since we turned 65, except for extremely low prescription costs. We pay 1$-$30 for 90 day RXs. I don't know how long this will last, but it has helped our budget.