Why do people wait so long to retire?

No "regrats" here. Original goal was 40 but got married and divorced along with marriage related lifestyle creep.... I learned a lot from the marriage failure and it's part of why I'm a better person now than I might otherwise be. "Happy people don't fail, Happy people just learn" - Lori McKenna

Planned to ER in 2020 but OMY through the first year of COVID as things were dicey and it wouldn't have been the funnest environment to ER into. I would've been much more lean but working and the additional income/savings allowed me to have a larger safety margin for which I am grateful.
 
No "regrats" here. Original goal was 40 but got married and divorced along with marriage related lifestyle creep.... I learned a lot from the marriage failure and it's part of why I'm a better person now than I might otherwise be. "Happy people don't fail, Happy people just learn" - Lori McKenna

Planned to ER in 2020 but OMY through the first year of COVID as things were dicey and it wouldn't have been the funnest environment to ER into. I would've been much more lean but working and the additional income/savings allowed me to have a larger safety margin for which I am grateful.
40 would be Really Early!
 
Do you wish you would have left sooner?
I was always a good saver but not very knowledgeable about personal finance. By the time I learned what it would take to retire I was already FI.

I continued working full time a couple more years because I was working from home, liked my job, and had complete schedule flexibility, so work didn't get in the way of anything else I wanted to do, including travel.

As things have turned out with my investments I could have retired sooner ... but I had no way to know that in advance. And now I am very happy to have more than I expect to need. For me, much better to work a little longer than necessary than not work long enough.
 
It seems like most on this forum could have retired earlier. I know there is always the fear of the unknown...unknown meaning portfolio performance. A lot of members here seems to have a lot stashed away and they're never going to get close to burning through all of their investments. Do you wish you would have left sooner?
Could I? Yes. Without hindsight? no. With hindsight? still no - had to complete several things in my career before I was satisfied with it. Now, had I died a year after I left, I probably would have left earlier. ;)
 
...As things have turned out with my investments I could have retired sooner ... but I had no way to know that in advance. And now I am very happy to have more than I expect to need. For me, much better to work a little longer than necessary than not work long enough.
My thought exactly...
 
I guess there's a fine line of overly cautious and not cautious enough. Those lines can get blurred and keep people from retiring.
That's exactly it. The line is fuzzy and gray, not black and white, as the probabilistic outcomes of FIREcalc or any other retirement calculator will show. People naturally want to err on the side of caution, as it is scarier to risk running out of money than it is to risk dying with money left over.
 
I'm not sure what a mid life crisis looks like but maybe I'm going through it now. I'm not lusting for shiny toys, rather analysing retirement scenarios, where to pull money from, where to move money to, how to reduce taxes....giving me a headache. We're hoping to retire in 10 years so I should take a chill pill.
 
The short answer is for most of us: you get one shot... better make sure you are on the mark! Some have careers, skills, and contacts that they can jump in and out of the workforce without too much risk but most of us are not that lucky. Even the lucky highly marketable folks, if off the mark, will not know they missed until 5, 10, 15 years into ER.

My planning book I kept at work my last couple years (mostly gathering personnel docs and policies I'd need after I was gone) had a burning ship on the cover... no one but me knew the relevance of that image.
 
My original goal was 53, but my company took away my pension plan, which changed my plan, and I instead retired at 59.5, due to IRA regulations. Total of 37 years. My last few working years were good, but I was ready to go, AND my 6 retirement years have (mostly) been some of the best times of my life.

So, I don't think I should have done it sooner. Financially, it helped a bit to work those last few years, but we are fortunate to have more than we will should ever need, thanks to good markets and those extra years of working. That gives peace of mind.

For those of you that are still working, one of the best times of my working years was when I got laid off from my megacorp job after 27 years. This gave me a summer "off", and chance to recharge a bit. Sure, it was a little stressful not having a job, but I got a better one after 3 months, where I worked 10 more years. So, take a "sabbatical", if you can swing it.
 
I think the main reason why most Americans don't retire earlier is because they cannot afford to. Most Americans will no longer be getting a pension and don't have sufficient savings. Another important reason for some to delay retirement is the cost of retiree health insurance. It used to also be the availability of health insurance prior to Medicare age. (That could become a problem again because the Supreme Court agreed just a few days ago to hear a case brought by a religious organization which challenges the ACA's mandated coverage of a drug which prevents HIV transmission. I fear that this Supreme Court could use the case to overturn the entire ACA.)

When I retired (13 years ago at age 57), the ACA was not yet in effect. But I had recently learned that when I exhausted COBRA coverage after 18 months, I would become eligible for a comparable health insurance policy available in my state which would be a bridge to when ACA coverage would first be available nationwide. There were 3 other reasons: I calculated that financially I would be OK; My B.S. bucket at work was overflowing; My mom increasingly needed some help due to my dad's worsening dementia.
 
A common scenario on this Forum is a person who's currently 75, who retired at 57, but could have retired, in hindsight, at 53. Not having done so at 53, isn't so much a regret, but a philosophical introspection, of trade-offs and options and eventualities. I respect that, but am also baffled by the numbers. If our hero is now 75, he or she has been retired for 18 years... as opposed to the alternative, of 22 years. Is 18 really that different from 22? In other words, the "I could have retired earlier" is perhaps more a statement of financial readiness, of investments going well, and spending staying muted.

As to why people don't retire earlier, my view is perhaps contrarian, but I'd say that financial readiness precedes emotional or cultural readiness. Thus the distinction between FI and RE, in FIRE. A person of modest taste and prodigious capacity to save, might become financially independent quite earlier in life, perhaps before even reaching middle age. The financial readiness is set! What's not set, is emotion and culture. Emotion is an anxiety, or a dread of being accused of parasitism, to borrow and old Soviet term. Emotion says, that we "belong" in a certain milieu and community and construct. Departing too much from it, is too gross and odd of an innovation... it just feels somehow wrong. This is reinforced by our Puritanical culture, which extols work at Man's true calling.
 
I'm not sure what a mid life crisis looks like but maybe I'm going through it now. I'm not lusting for shiny toys, rather analysing retirement scenarios, where to pull money from, where to move money to, how to reduce taxes....giving me a headache. We're hoping to retire in 10 years so I should take a chill pill.

It's ok to do an analysis - in fact that's part of the process. Also, respecting the needs of your future self does not mean neglecting your present self.

I cannot speak for the entire retired world as to how they chose their retirement date. As to me, I do not regret not retiring sooner. (I would consider that a waste of my time.)
 
A common scenario on this Forum is a person who's currently 75, who retired at 57, but could have retired, in hindsight, at 53. Not having done so at 53, isn't so much a regret, but a philosophical introspection, of trade-offs and options and eventualities. I respect that, but am also baffled by the numbers. If our hero is now 75, he or she has been retired for 18 years... as opposed to the alternative, of 22 years. Is 18 really that different from 22? In other words, the "I could have retired earlier" is perhaps more a statement of financial readiness, of investments going well, and spending staying muted.

As to why people don't retire earlier, my view is perhaps contrarian, but I'd say that financial readiness precedes emotional or cultural readiness. Thus the distinction between FI and RE, in FIRE. A person of modest taste and prodigious capacity to save, might become financially independent quite earlier in life, perhaps before even reaching middle age. The financial readiness is set! What's not set, is emotion and culture. Emotion is an anxiety, or a dread of being accused of parasitism, to borrow and old Soviet term. Emotion says, that we "belong" in a certain milieu and community and construct. Departing too much from it, is too gross and odd of an innovation... it just feels somehow wrong. This is reinforced by our Puritanical culture, which extols work at Man's true calling.
I largely agree. However, you typically don’t know what it’s like to be retired until you are retired. I didn’t know how much less I’d spend until I was retired and we are not terribly frugal. More importantly, I did not calculate tax savings on SS or Medicare I no longer needed to pay. I didn’t even think of the obvious- I no longer needed max out my 401K.
We set our budget at $160K in 2018. Have never spent $120k in a year even though we don’t budget.
To your point I did feel a sense of loss at job layoff and had to remind myself I was tired of the job. I did feel like I got the side-eye from people saying I was retired at 57.
Wish I had taken advantage of the freedom sooner. Everything would be different with less assets and a weaker sequence of returns.
 
I knew dear old Dad would leave me an appreciable inheritance (he was the original LBYM) but I never counted on it, seeing that elderly folks can easily blow through their savings in a long term care facility. I actually retired two weeks before he died, having built a portfolio on my own (and DW!). I wound up getting the inheritance and could have retired many years sooner, but I don't regret being cautious. His financial advisor (who ripped him off over the years, but that's another story) told me and DB that Dad always approached his portfolio as something he would some day leave to us.
 
In my case, it was primarily because I was enjoying what I was doing - until I didn't.

Same here. I worked till age 61 but had planned to wait till 65. I've also been driven my entire adult life by a fear of being old and poor. Well, I did get old. :) Having a husband 15 years older, I could see how extra cash made old age a lot easier to handle: business class on transatlantics, hiring out work that was formerly DIY, a dental implant instead of missing teeth, etc. I also wanted to be able to have the money for good options when I wanted to move to a place with more maintenance and services and, if needed, long-term care.

In retrospect I could have retired earlier but better to have over-saved.
 
My parents both had pensions, where they spent less than what was coming in. That made it easy for them to retire at 55. We don't have any pensions or annuities. Retiring at 60 required a leap of faith, especially for a pessimist like me. We were also older parents and wanted to get both of our kids through college before retiring.
 
Until the ACA, a lot of folks could not retire early no matter their savings, due to lack of insurance. Private insurance was available, but "pre-existing" conditions and lifetime caps made it a risk to retire too soon before Medicare, especially if you already had something, even minor.

Pensions and retiree medical are also something that fewer of us have these days.

We probably went about a year later than we could have (at 47 still rather early), but I was angling for a package which I landed, which gave me an extra 14 months of pay and health coverage, so that year of time paid off nicely.
 
I like what I was doing until the business changed and the fun disappeared. I wrapped up what I was working on and was gone at the end of that year.
 
I planned to retire at 65 but left a few months earlier. Money was not the issue to stay that long. It could have been a few years earlier but I liked my career path. It was what I wanted to do, it gave me a few perks that I otherwise would not have had, I was pretty much left alone to do my job, and it gave me a lifestyle with plenty of relaxing time. It did take me 20 years before I reached the level I wanted and it did involve a 10 year side track in industry with national and international travel and the chance to be published in technical journals and co-author a technical/scientific book.
Since my wife retired a year before from her teaching job with 22 years in the Coast Guard reserves we were covered for medical with Medicare and Tricare for LIfe. Couple that with a frugal lifestyle, regular investing, no mortgage, and no debts then the only thing we lack is more time. But then that is the same issue for everyone. I can't complain since it has been a great ride.
 
Often times people know what they want to retire from, don’t have much idea what they want to retire to. Then the OMY syndrome kicks in. Human nature we don’t like changes, especially there is uncertainty.
 
I don’t have much of a fondness for the taste of cat food. I wanted to make sure that I could buy groceries until I died, whenever that is. I also didn’t want to worry about how much everything cost or skimp and save on every thing I bought. It was simpler and more enjoyable for me to work a bit longer so I could avoid these situations.
 
As soon as I saw the great conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn I knew it was the right moment. I confirmed with my horoscope and got a tarot card reading just to be safe.
You might say it was dawning?
 
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