Culture
Recycles dryer sheets
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2007
- Messages
- 491
After dithering for several years, I officially set my retirement date to be January 1, 2014. A long ways away, but it still feels good to make it official.
What does "officially" mean? Have you sent in a letter of resignation giving your employer 4 years' notice? Or is it "official" in the sense that you have pencilled it in on the calendar? How committed are you?
It led me to set a specific date for getting my home mortgage paid off, and I have taken action on that. I've started using that date in withdrawal rate simulations, and now I'm looking into how to build a health-care 'bridge' between that date and Medicare. I've evaluated my (small) defined benefit vs. (smaller) lump sum options.
Congratulations, Culture!Two of the things that have made use feel better about setting a date are paying off the mortgage, and having spent the past two years paying for our own health insurance.
Well, it is a little bit of a weird situation. I am self employed, and I set up a defined benefit pension plan for myself and my wife. In order to set it up, we had to decide when we wanted to retire. Because the way pension law is set up, we get the largest tax savings by defining an earlier retirement date. However, if we do not actually retire at this date, out pension adviser tells us that three things will probably happen:
1) The IRS will determine that the plan is an illegal tax shelter, resulting in large fines.
2) The plan will become overfunded, resulting in large fines.
3) We will have to pay him a lot of money to straighten things out, apart and above any IRS fines.
So, by signing on the dotted line , we have pretty much irrevocably set our retirement date, sans a willingness to spend a lot of money to avoid retirement. I will mention that this is a year later than we already planned on retiring. We felt more comfortable with a little buffer.
Congratulations, Culture!![]()
I found that actually paying my health insurance premiums is less awful than it was to think about it in advance.
Does running your business require more than full time or can you wind it down gradually?