57 & tired of the grind

[DayVee B]

Hey All! The last of our 4 kids has 2 years of college left. My wife can retire in 4 years with around a $155K lump sum payout and 15K annual pension. I plan to jump at that time too and currently have just over 400K in my 401K. (Will contribute between 60-80K or more in the next 4 yrs.) Should also have at least an additional 100-160k in cash by retirement and maybe live "income-free" except the pension for a couple years before starting SS payments. In current dollars our retirement budget will be 65K which should be more than okay here in Kansas and FireCalc shows that is 100% doable. I hope I'll be able to pick up a few nuggets here to either help increase/maximize retirement income or make it possible for me to join the ranks of the retired even earlier than 4 years. See ya around the boards folks!

[Time2]

It sounds like if the market continues up, you will have about $1M, if flat, $800k. Plus the $15k pension.
You could probably take the $65k pulling a little more than 4% from your savings and then in a few years SS will make it easy.

[38Chevy454]

Welcome to the forum. It seems you are in good shape for your plan, assuming your budget numbers are accurate. Your only real hurdle will be the bridge between retiring and when you choose to receive SS. The SS will fill most of your gap after wife's pension so that your withdrawals from savings will reduce significantly. Having the after tax money available will help that bridge time, but consider that at low income levels it may be beneficial to do some pretax money withdrawals since tax effect will be very low. Or can do some Roth conversion at low tax rates. Hang around and read a lot, you will learn a considerable amount which will help you know when and confident in your retirement decision and plan.

[DayVee B]

Thanks for you comments. Most of the 401K is from tax deffered contributions (Came to the Roth game a little late but now all my 401K contributions are Roth) so I was thinking of doing some conversion of the 401K to Roth in the low income years. And the pension is state non-taxable. Just trying to drink in as much info as I can so I have at least explored lots of ideas and learned enough to avoid arriving at retirement unprepared.