To all... thanks for the responses. Certainly more varied than I would have expected.
Believe it or not, I was not asking for advice. I know where I stand, and am comfortable our financial position.
The thought behind the post, was to move you (or someone else
) to think in terms of what
your outlook might be, later on in life... when your interests and abilities have changed. The reason the house was excluded, is that most here don't like count it as an asset for planning purposes.
As to planning (long term... 10 to 30 years) my theory is to plan in terms of today, so trying to pad one's assets to account for inflation is virtually impossible. The billion dollar estimate might not be adequate in the case of infinite inflation. I've just assumed parallel asset growth. When we first retired, our own projections for 30 year needs w/o inflation (1989 to today) leave us almost exactly on plan.
So... in terms of real dollars, we've been very surprised that since age 75, with the exception of two low value 2nd homes which we'll divest from this year, our actual cost of living has dropped from about 50K to well under 30K.
The greatest cost differences come from auto expense, travel expense, entertainment, eating out, buying "for the house", clothing and utilities, maintenance and upkeep (for our other "homes"). I think that the posts above that discussed older relatives who are living on markedy lower, ongoing incomes, is closer to our situation. The Social security base is a godsend. While much lower than what it would be today, taking SS at age 62 was a good deal for us, since from age 53 to 62 we were burning through cash.
As a comment to newer members who may not have been exposed to the idea of using an "owned house" to use medicaid to protect a surviving spouse, you need to explore this as an option to renting. It might change some of your plans.
Lower costs during the later years, made me look back, a change my original thoughts about retiring (detail in some other posts)... to include retirement as a two phase process, with the understanding that actual, later year expenses would be less. We are not investment savvy, as most of our assets are in IBonds. Nonetheless, those dollars are almost exactly where they were more than ten years ago.
Thanks again for a fun exercise.
In that case 7-10x the expenses.
