r/Retire

We finally reached $1 million dollars and plan to retire in about 1 1/2 years. Wife will be 62 then and I will be 63 1/2. Our spend is $55,000 a year and our combined social security will cover this spend. We are getting excited now for retirement but still are concerned about health care. We plan on using COBRA which will get me to Medicare and she will buy from the open market for 1 1/2 years until she is eligible for Medicare. Just wanted to know what others are paying so we have an idea what we might be paying. We know everyone is different and there are a lot of factors involved but I think it still might give us a range to shoot for

I’ve been teaching kindergarten - 2nd grade for 29 years. Kids are changing, parenting is changing and I’m tired!
At 55 years old now I would retire with 41% of salary for pension but I need to wait till 60 years old and get 73%
Some days …
I don’t think I can make it another 5 years.

So my question is how can I make the waiting more bearable?

Is there anything people did when they had a 5 years count down.

I’ve thought of taking my yearly 10 sick days off on a Monday each month- as an incentive.
10 less Sunday scaries !!!

What helps the waiting??

This is so cool. I’ve been close but never actually hit this milestone in a single month.

I (35m) and my wife have a NW of 1.98M, broken down as 120k cash, 1.6M invested, and our house at 260k. No debt or mortgage other than the revolving balances on our credit cards which are paid off monthly. Our investments gained 180k this month. My wife is a SAHM and my salary is 145k, so this was significantly more than we take home in a year.

I wish I could share with someone other than my wife but won’t for obvious reasons, so I’ll share here.

ETA - for the love of god please stop telling me not to get excited or that this isn’t normal. Absolutely no where have I said I expect this all the time or that I don’t realize it can go down. I’m celebrating this milestone.

I've saved money over the past ten years from still living with my dad in California. I'm single and will probably always be single, so my retirement very likely wouldn't factor in for two people.

Essentially I have saved enough into Vanguard's VOO by now and have run estimations through various online calculators so that, if the investment growth rate for the next 30 years is at around 10%, and the inflation rate is at about 2.7%, and the investment fees remain 0.03%, at a 4% safe withdrawal rate I will have approximately $24,000 annually in investments by the age of 65.

This amount combined with what I would get with social security would be enough, I would like to think. Of course if I started to fully max out my Roth IRA that would also give me a bit more by 65.

I'm wondering if what I would have from investments plus social security would be enough considering the retirement lifestyle I would want for myself. I'm already a pretty frugal person and I can't drive since my vision is 20/50, so no car ownership and all the expenses that that carries.

I'm a solitary homebody who doesn't require much in the means of entertainment. I wouldn't want anything lavish during retirement, and am pretty sure about just wanting a small tiny home not too far from a town -- nowhere in the Midwest, probably someplace in Western New York. But not too far from either a town or a bus station.

I imagine I would pass a lot of my free time doing a lot of what it is I already do in my spare time, which is read, exercise, listen to audiobooks, teach myself new topics such as learning some of a new language or learn more history or science, read biographies of influential people/artists/scientists, play video games. I'm very used to not going out much and I am very much an introvert, and consider myself to be an intellectual. I would do some travel, but not often and am already experienced with budget travel for myself and being good and careful with overall spending.

I imagine that even if I didn't elect to build some of my own tiny house by myself, and I purchased the land for it and bought the house from a company, then my monthly costs wouldn't be very high.

I'm wondering if there's currently anyone already living a similar lifestyle -- tiny house, single, no car ownership. I'm wondering what your typical monthly spend is.

I want to be sure I'm on the right financial track for retirement, if it seems like I should be saving even more and putting more into retirement investments instead of starting to save to eventually afford the purchase of land and a tiny house at some point. I've heard stories of people who have made tiny homes through buying sheds and such from Home Depot before making modifications to those.

And I would appreciate any recommendations on what else I could research on my own so that I can be more prepared for eventual retirement.

Thanks in advance.

Hello, my wife and I are approaching 50. We both have a few health conditions. Nothing major (yet). Both of our children are about to enter college, so we have started thinking about our future, and how we'd like to live our 50s, into our early 60s, then retire. We live in a high cost (taxes, energy, maintenance, etc.) New England state with way more house than we'll need after the kids launch. The blueprint for most of my friends parents was to retire, then downsize to the south (mostly Florida, and some SC/NC). Some of them eventually became half-backers. Lately I've been thinking about what I've been calling "pre-retirement." It looks something like this: Stay where we are for the next 4-6 years to maintain in-state tuition for the kids' college.

When the kids have graduated college, we sell the house, and downsize to the south. Probably South Carolina, or possibly East Tennessee. Buy a 1,400sq ft 2/1.5 ranch that would be more appropriate to age in.

We are comfortable, but not financially independent, and would continue working in our new location for 8-10 years, then retire in our early 60s.

We both work in public education, so our employment is relatively portable. We'd have to be certain that wherever we move, we have time to become vested in the new retirement plan where we settle .

Random notes: we live in an area with severe winters. I don't see myself being able to maintain our home here when we are elderly. Health care here is challenging, and we regularly travel 30-60 for various appointments that often take months to schedule.

Has anyone done something similar, and if so, how did it work out? If not, what kept you from doing this? All thoughts are welcome. Thank you