My situation

[dan71]

Hi all, I am 54 dw is 52 both work full time both have full benefits (ie,medical dental pension etc.) I am working about 50 to 60 hours per week and am tired of it. I have considered ER, we have a paid for house and other than monthly expenses no debt. We have about 500k in various mutual funds iras stocks and cash savings. Wife enjoys her job and would like to stay untill age 62 her income is 33000. My income is 67000, I have thought about going part time to a different job with easier hours. I would appreciate any thoughts comments concerning my situation. Dan71 as

[SecondCor521]

Dan71,

Welcome to the board!

Others are far more knowledgeable than I am, but here's my thoughts. Using a 4% rule of thumb, your $500k can provide you with $20k of income per year. Can the $33k from your wife plus that $20k from your portfolio plus your part time job salary cover your expenses?

The other big bugaboo is health insurance. Can you get coverage through your wife's employment?

When your wife hits 62 would she start collecting SS?

2Cor521

[jdw_fire]

Welcome,

The way to determine if you have the resources to retire is first calculate your expected expenses in retirement, second determine your assets that will be used to support your retirement (portfolio size, DBP pension benefits, SS benefits, spousal income, future monitary windfalls etc) and lastly plug these numbers into FIRECalc. You must then decide if the results are something you feel comfortable with.

jdw_fire

[HobbyDave]

As others have mentioned, I think the first thing you need to figure out is your monthly expenses. The usual exercise is to keep a pad of paper with you at all times, and write down every single expense (and make sure to get any automatic payments of utilities, taxes, etc).

Then you can write these all out after a couple months and figure out exactly how much you would need to be making to cover these expenses. That will be the most important part of figuring out if you could retire or not. This would also help you figure out how much you need to make in a part-time job to cover your expenses. If you're only spending 20k per year for example, then you really don't need another job. If you're spending 70k per year, you'll have to find a pretty decent part-time job to cover the hole.

Also keep in mind that you'd rather not touch your IRA/401k accounts until you're 59.5 years old. So if you write again, splitting up pre-tax and post-tax investments would be helpful as well.