daylatedollarshort
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2013
- Messages
- 9,358
A good retirement in my opinion is a retirement in which your standard of living in retirement is equal or better than your standard of living while earning an engineering salary.
At a minimum, this means your retirement income should be about 65% of your working salary assuming your house is paid off. People who retired with a lower standard of living can also be happy. I get that. In my case, my retirement income is about 180% of my former engineering salary when I was working full time. I could not have done that if I had retired at 55 and I did not take the opportunity to double dip.
Therefore....Your problem statement is wrong:
Let's see:
Person A who retires at 55 happy and content for 30 years.
Person B who retires at 65 with almost double the retirement income of person A, live like a king for 20 years and also has money to maintain his health better than person A and ultimately likely to live longer than 20 years.
I already picked B. Mainly because my job from age 55 to age 65 was an easy low stress job with friendly people and I enjoy coming in to work while double dipping and pulling in two paychecks with one job.
I admit that I was ready to quit in a heartbeat if my job started to sour. I always had an option to become person A but I never took that option mainly because the job was a 4 day 10 hours workweek with lots of vacation time. My thinking at that time was that having a 3 day weekend every single week plus generous vacation time is like having a "partial early retirement".
Most people under these circumstances would "probably" like to become person B if an opportunity opened up of having (1) an easy low stress highly paid second job, (2) lots of vacation time, (3) earning two paychecks with one easy job and (4) ultimately having a retirement income close to 2X than that of a 55 years old retiree.
As Shakespeare said it best, thou doth protest too much. It seems like you have a lot of regrets working 10 more years and are trying to convince yourself you did the right thing by implying people here are in danger of going to work as Walmart greeters, will run out of money, aren't maintaining their health, have an inferior quality of life as you do, etc. You seem to base everything on happiness & quality of life = $.
Per the longest running study on happiness, the #1 happiness factor is social connections, which usually involves not trying to put other people down because they have different priorities in life than than you do.
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