Reply to Do I Need to Save More for Retirement?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, you're finding out that this forum is super conservative when it comes to planning for retirement. According to quite a few posters, having $10M in retirement is barely enough to keep you in a tent on the streets. In your case, if you stopped contributing a single penny more outside social security contributions, your money will keep growing and you'll have a few million plus a comfortable SS income. Which is more than most people will ever have. Certainly enough to live comfortably off a 4% draw plus SS especially once you have no mortgage.

You'll also discover that people vastly overestimate how much they really need for retirement. My widowed mother lives off $135k between pension and SS and her life is comfortable, paid off house, several trips a year, lots of social activities. She always complains she's too busy. Retired ladies lunch a lot! She has friends from her teaching days who have significantly less and are still happy and living well.

People freak out about the costs of continuing care communities but they only look at the extreme examples. The very nice one my mother is vaguely looking at starts at $4k a month for a person in a 1-bedroom apartment once you buy the unit, and that includes virtually all the bills. It goes up if you want a bigger apartment. Full service dementia care can start out at $10k a month but if you're at that point, you're not living very long. The average is 2-3 years. And many if not most elderly people survive just fine without continuing care communities, staying in their homes. My grandparents lived into their 90s and stayed at home till the very end. They had help at the very end but we're talking about 1-2 years at most.

Look around the US. Do we have an epidemic of elderly homeless people, abandoned to starve on the streets? Nope. Somehow it all works out.

I'm in a similar position as you agewise and net worth and know the feeling of being frugal and hard working for the last 20 years and wanting to enjoy some of it now. Continuing our savings pattern, even factoring in two big bear markets between now and 2046 (my planned retirement year goal), we will end up with a significantly larger retirement income than our current income. Which is a bit weird given that we live nicely now.

I do have these thoughts re enjoying life now versus delaying gratifications until retirement. My biggest fear is less retirement savings but getting laid off in my 50s and struggling to find replacement jobs, although truth be told, pretty much everyone I know who was ever reorganized out did find new jobs, perhaps not at the same income levels for some of them, but more than enough to keep life going. Right now the plan is to continue the aggressive savings till I'm 50 and then reevaluate. Priorities have also changed the older I get, a few years ago I'd have been hungry for a bigger house but now I prize my 2.7% mortgage and ain't ever giving that up as we still live in a nice neighborhood, just in a slightly too small house. But I can see us spending a bit more on travel and maybe nicer cars than our standard Japanese vehicles. And if we hit 60 and the retirement goals are on target, then we'll sell and move somewhere nice in one of our preferred locations. Suggest you look at finding a balance in your life between future goals and what you'd like now. [/quote]

This is a great summary. It’s really amazing that so many posters on this forum are financially successful and yet so obtuse [/quote]

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