Reply to How much to retire in late 50's?

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "How much to retire in late 50's?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ok, so let's say you have health insurance/expenses costs 50k/year (aiming high here to account for volatility) for the next 6 years until you're 65 and qualify for Medicare.  300k. Set that aside.

If you consider 3,300,000 as the remainder of your portfolio, and your annual spending not including that to be 120K (to account for taxes) firecalc suggests that you have greater than 93% chance of sustaining that until you're 100+ retiring now.
That leaves a 200k emergency fund to cover whatever else.

So it seems to me that you *could* do this--but the numbers are close enough that you want to do a careful analysis and/or be willing to reduce spending if you're off in your accounting. What are your actual taxes? What will the cost of Medicare be when you retire? Also, in the early years of retirement annual spending on travel/eating out etc might increase, but that tends to trickle off in later years. I would say to your financial planner, this is what we want to do--how can we make it work rather than 'can we do this?'.  Because the safest answer--and the one that often gives the planner more money--is to wait--but it's not always best for life.  Your listing of worries seemed to be pretty fear-filled rather than totally rational.

I do think your husband who has to put in the grueling hours gets to decide that he doesn't want to do it anymore--(I couldn't tell from your post if you're mainly the one with the "security" concerns). [b]Both of you could look for easier work options--even though you've been out of the workforce--you should try in earnest rather than just assuming he's the one to keep working if the numbers don't work. If he needs to stop, and you want more financial security, you can look for work.[/b] You just need something that will give you health insurance for another year or so.  Also, can he discreetly review phased retirement options at his workplace--or ask directly once he's sure he's going to retire?  Some people negotiate staying on the health insurance rolls via consulting or the like and many places have more formal slow reductions.

[/quote]

We are both concerned about financial security. But he's counting on [u]me[/u] to confirm we'll be financially ok for  a comfortable retirement, and as some of you concurred, we're sort of borderline for such an early retirement right now.  And no one really knows how long they will live or what the market will do. I've looked at a lot of financial calculators, including some fairly detailed ones on sites like fidelity.com.  Assumed health care costs, life span, and market performance end up driving the results.  I assume "significantly below average" for market performance (because retirement portfolios don't usually maximize market returns.) I can make it all look great if I reduce our planning to age 90 instead of age 94. (None of my grandparents lived to 90, let alone 94.)  Health care is a crap shoot.  When I spoke to the financial planner last year, she agreed $30,000 a year for two would be a conservative estimate; now a year later, it's more like $40,000.

I agree about the theoretical possibility of my working, maybe to supplement his doing something less demanding.  Unfortunately, I've got some volunteer commitments for a few more months, but I've told him to cut loose whenever he wants because I want him to [i]get to[/i] retirement.   Talking to the financial planner again in a week.  Thanks for all the suggestions!
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics