Hello to everyone. We are 2 POSSLQ DINKs (Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters/Dual Income No Kids), aged 61/59 living in Michigan. For our working lives, we lived where we had to, worked fairly hard (very hard in her case), and were pretty conservative with spending. We’ve started to travel more over the last few years as her job has spooled down and ended. We tried the snowbird thing this winter and liked it, planning to do that again in 2020.
I say we’re 7/8 retired. DGF, (59 y/o) fully retired last Fall. I am currently enjoying a unique opportunity to work very little and still earn a pretty good wage but I can see that window will slowly close over the next year or two. So that’s ½ the couple fully retired and ½ the couple ¾ retired, which makes 7/8, amirite??
It’s probably appropriate to mention how grateful I am to be able/qualified to post in an “Early Retirement” Forum. Although we have worked hard, recovered from setbacks, and delayed gratification--many others are having a lot harder time of things. We are very lucky to have the “problems” we have.
I found this forum several months ago and have gotten a lot of value from it and so decided I should become a more active participant.
I won’t ask the “can we retire?” question…as we clearly can (details below). To run the list of things I’m supposed to mention in my introduction:
Expenses/Cashflow: We will be taking more of a deep dive together as the year progresses, but I estimate we jointly spent around 65 K last year. We are generally “cheap dates”. I hope to increase the spending in our 60-75 years so we can experience things while we are physically able to. My parents were a great role model in this respect. We have No Debt.
Health Care: I have Tricare and she is currently using the ACA.
Passive Income: Mil Pension for me, I will also get a pension from my second career when I bail. Neither is huge but combined, they should come close to covering our basic expenses. She will get a widows S/Secy in a year, I will likely delay filing for many years.
Investments: We have a “7 digit” assortment that includes conventional brokerage accounts, 401 K, Roth 401 K, IRA and Roth IRA—Oh yeah and a SEP too. A lot of it is VERY conservatively allocated (we have “won the game”..). Again, we’ll be taking a deeper dive in the following months (currently we’re in two separate places), but I punched in some numbers into FIRECALC for the purpose of this intro.
I over-rode the investment allocation to only 25% equity, and used a higher spending amount than we are currently using (recall that our basic spend should already be covered with two pensions and one S/Secy, so this entire number would just be “extra” spending). Even with the conservative allocation, we have 100% success to age 100. Hmmm.
A friend of mine recently said the only reason I’m still working is because I’m greedy. While I'm not sure that's it, when I look at the figures, it seems to me that I don't need to continue with work for financial reasons.
Why I’m here, what I’m hoping to learn about:
--Tax “problems”. I’m trying to wrap my hands around the gestalt of the tax situation. We have some big capital gains, when to withdraw (and from where), there is the whole “tax torpedo” thing… and we haven’t decided where we intend to live or what we want to be when we grow up yet! I’m not suggesting that avoiding taxes will be the driving factor, but I want to understand the options and make appropriate choices. These are great problems to have BTW, and I occasionally have to remind myself of that.
--Transition from Saving to Spending. I already found my way to the “blow your dough” thread! We have both been pretty frugal but really don’t need to be.
--Social aspects of retirement. Neither of us is especially social and our careers weren’t real conducive to expanding our social circle a lot. Never connected through kids (she had no kids, I say I have “none that I am currently aware of”, just to be safe..) We’ve been getting out a bit more, and we enjoyed meeting some of the retirees on our snowbird trip.
--Location. Another “problem”—we’re in a nice place right now, so there’s no great hurry to get out of here. We have also accumulated a lot of “stuff” over the decades. We remain open to a better situation including a winter/summer setup, but to justify the hassle and expense, it has to be clearly better than our current arrangement and that’s a reasonably high bar.
The good news, as I mentioned before is that these are good problems to have and we aren’t on a timeline. I’m looking forward to figuring this out and appreciate your taking the time to read this.
I say we’re 7/8 retired. DGF, (59 y/o) fully retired last Fall. I am currently enjoying a unique opportunity to work very little and still earn a pretty good wage but I can see that window will slowly close over the next year or two. So that’s ½ the couple fully retired and ½ the couple ¾ retired, which makes 7/8, amirite??
It’s probably appropriate to mention how grateful I am to be able/qualified to post in an “Early Retirement” Forum. Although we have worked hard, recovered from setbacks, and delayed gratification--many others are having a lot harder time of things. We are very lucky to have the “problems” we have.
I found this forum several months ago and have gotten a lot of value from it and so decided I should become a more active participant.
I won’t ask the “can we retire?” question…as we clearly can (details below). To run the list of things I’m supposed to mention in my introduction:
Expenses/Cashflow: We will be taking more of a deep dive together as the year progresses, but I estimate we jointly spent around 65 K last year. We are generally “cheap dates”. I hope to increase the spending in our 60-75 years so we can experience things while we are physically able to. My parents were a great role model in this respect. We have No Debt.
Health Care: I have Tricare and she is currently using the ACA.
Passive Income: Mil Pension for me, I will also get a pension from my second career when I bail. Neither is huge but combined, they should come close to covering our basic expenses. She will get a widows S/Secy in a year, I will likely delay filing for many years.
Investments: We have a “7 digit” assortment that includes conventional brokerage accounts, 401 K, Roth 401 K, IRA and Roth IRA—Oh yeah and a SEP too. A lot of it is VERY conservatively allocated (we have “won the game”..). Again, we’ll be taking a deeper dive in the following months (currently we’re in two separate places), but I punched in some numbers into FIRECALC for the purpose of this intro.
I over-rode the investment allocation to only 25% equity, and used a higher spending amount than we are currently using (recall that our basic spend should already be covered with two pensions and one S/Secy, so this entire number would just be “extra” spending). Even with the conservative allocation, we have 100% success to age 100. Hmmm.
A friend of mine recently said the only reason I’m still working is because I’m greedy. While I'm not sure that's it, when I look at the figures, it seems to me that I don't need to continue with work for financial reasons.
Why I’m here, what I’m hoping to learn about:
--Tax “problems”. I’m trying to wrap my hands around the gestalt of the tax situation. We have some big capital gains, when to withdraw (and from where), there is the whole “tax torpedo” thing… and we haven’t decided where we intend to live or what we want to be when we grow up yet! I’m not suggesting that avoiding taxes will be the driving factor, but I want to understand the options and make appropriate choices. These are great problems to have BTW, and I occasionally have to remind myself of that.
--Transition from Saving to Spending. I already found my way to the “blow your dough” thread! We have both been pretty frugal but really don’t need to be.
--Social aspects of retirement. Neither of us is especially social and our careers weren’t real conducive to expanding our social circle a lot. Never connected through kids (she had no kids, I say I have “none that I am currently aware of”, just to be safe..) We’ve been getting out a bit more, and we enjoyed meeting some of the retirees on our snowbird trip.
--Location. Another “problem”—we’re in a nice place right now, so there’s no great hurry to get out of here. We have also accumulated a lot of “stuff” over the decades. We remain open to a better situation including a winter/summer setup, but to justify the hassle and expense, it has to be clearly better than our current arrangement and that’s a reasonably high bar.
The good news, as I mentioned before is that these are good problems to have and we aren’t on a timeline. I’m looking forward to figuring this out and appreciate your taking the time to read this.