long time lurker, first time poster

[grateful]

hi,
my wife and i are 59 and 57 respectively. after lurking around this site for more than a year i have set my date - 6/30/07. she is probably going to work a year longer because she thinks she is going to have to ease into being at home with me all the time. neither of us have pensions or employer paid post-retirement health care coverage. all we have is s.s. and what we have saved. we did our cash flow expense budget two years ago and have been checking it against actual expenditures. we have a plan for replacing major items built into our cash flow. we purchased a l.t.c. policy last year so the fear of long-term incapacitation would not keep us up at night. i have run every calculator i can find and we appear to have enough for at least a 35 year retirement with close to 100% success. our initial withdrawal rate will be under 4%.

we live in southern california, are bicycle tourists on our vacations to places like new zealand, france and all over the u.s. and we enjoy beach activities as we live only a short walk from the sand.

i want to thank all of you who moderate and contribute to the content here. this site has been the source of many good ideas and links to very useful articles for us. i will be posting a question related to health insurance on the "fire and money" board so i wanted to introduce ourselves first.

thanks for being here, grateful

[donheff]

Good luck Grateful. It looks like you both have planned things out well.

My DW is trying to cut back a bit before she ERs and has been working at home two days a week. She was pleasantly surprised to find that she doesn't mind having my slacker company around all day. It is making here more comfortable with quitting that rat race.