Lawrencewendall
Full time employment: Posting here.
Any time I feel my wife is overspending, I remind myself divorce would be much more expensive.
+1000 Ain't that the truth!!
Any time I feel my wife is overspending, I remind myself divorce would be much more expensive.
Spend money freely on what you value. Spend little on what you do not value. Formula for money happiness.
I posted a similar thread about this year’s ago.
I don’t know if I am just frugal, or just uninterested in a lot of things. I am 59 and could retire. But jut sure what I’d do all day. I don’t care about cars. I don’t like to travel. A lot of that has to do with I don’t sleep well outside the house. I feel like I have everything that I need, I really don’t want anything, and the wife and kids seem happy with what they have.
All that said, every calculator I run I will never run out of money. Yet, I am still frugal. So I feel like I should spend it.
Ugh.
Spend money freely on what you value. Spend little on what you do not value. Formula for money happiness.
I just did it. I winced at the end of the year when I found that I was blowing about 6% instead of the "safe" (nothing is ever safe) 4%.
Yup, I did it for 7 years straight. And at the end of the seven years I have 45% more dough than I started with.
Ha! For me it’s playing guitar. But I realized I can do what I want for under $500
FIRECalc says I can spend twice what I'm spending, even if I live to age 117. But seriously, why should this be a reason to struggle? I am at peace and happy. That's the whole point of having an adequately funded retirement, I thought.
I buy what I really want or need, and then I stop - - enough is enough.
Who knows, unexpected end of life expenses may use up every last cent. If not, my heirs deserve anything I can leave to them.
On a scale of 0-10 for life's problems, I'd say this was a solid 0.00000000001 (least problematic).
Robbie and Marko's posts reinforce something I've really noticed in the years I've retired. My go-to is the Fidelity calculator and to a lesser degree Firecalc. We all seem to get so focused on the worst case scenarios; for example Fido's "worst 10%" case. .
+1 I mentioned a few months ago that I had discovered the following:
Sixteen years ago I RE'd with $X.
Over the next sixteen years I spent $X (the same amount of money as what I started with). Today I have $2X!