So today was Valentine Day and as usual my old girl managed to stretch it out for a week or so. Last Monday we drove a 300 mile round trip so that I could buy her some See's candy, which isn't sold anywhere close by and we could only find it in a temporary kiosk at North Star Mall in San Antonio and it that was only going to be there from the 5th through the 14th except it wasn't really because the bad weather delayed the candy shipment but we were lucky that it got there the same day we did although we had to kill about four hours waiting for the folks to get the kiosk set up and open for business but that was OK because in the meantime we got to visit the Pioneer Mills museum and then see an exhibit on piranhas and other Amazon stuff at the Witte museum and have an awesome lunch at J. Alexander's. Yeah, I know that's a hell of a run on sentence but sometimes you just need one of those, know what I mean?
Anyway, our Valentine week started with that road trip to San Antonio and included another to Bandera as well as a couple of other lunches and some flowers from the supermarket. They were nice looking, though, although cheap ... which is really the subject of this post. Cheap, I mean.
Because one thing you didn't see me mention about this seven-day Valentine extravaganza was an expensive Valentine card. The reason is that we don't buy them anymore. The way that started was that my wife's parents reached retirement age and ran headlong into the "lots of time but no money" problem that most of us encounter. One of the ways they dealt with that was to use the same anniversary card for 20 years. Each year one of them would give it to the other one and the next year that one would give it back and so on for twenty years. When my wife and I were middle-aged and earning viable income we thought this was one of those quaint old folks things. Then we became quaint old folks and started doing it ourselves, along with other habits that our parents had become addicted to like never touching doorknobs and never laying your silverware down on a table at a restaurant. Yeah, like you don't do that too. OK. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend that you haven't started adopting those old fart idiosyncrasies yet. We did though and we took the card thing even further.
We don't give each other the same anniversary card, birthday card, Christmas card or valentine every year like my wife's parents did. Instead we dive into this huge moving box full of cards that we had given to each other in years past, and also cards that others have given to us, and we pick out a few to read to each other on the appropriate holiday or anniversary. So this morning we each selected about ten valentines from years past and read them to each other while we drank our pre-breakfast coffee and watched the History Channel's “Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy” which we had recorded a couple of nights ago. We had ten times the sentiment and none of the cost of buying a new $5 Hallmark card for each other.
We've been doing this for several years now and last year we decided that we really wanted to give each other a new card because we sort of knew most of the old ones by heart. We still didn't want to spend the money on the cards though. So we went into a Hallmark Crown store a couple of days before last Valentine Day and we looked over the valentines. Each of us picked out an ostentatious and expensive card with just the right sentiment that we wanted the other one to hear. I read my wife the one I had picked out for her and she did the same for me. We stood there for a few minutes admiring the valentines that we had picked out for each other and then we put them back in the rack. After that we went to Baskin-Robbins and used the ten bucks we had saved by not buying cards to get a couple of scoops of Love Potion 31. How sweet it is!
Monday, February 14, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Can We Retire Yet?
It's been quite awhile since I have posted to this blog. I wish I had a good excuse, but I don't. I'm back now, though, and I'll try to be more responsible in the future and post to this thing at least once a week. So here's this week's post:
Lately it seems that I've been reading a lot of articles on the subject of retirement. A lot of them are intended to help you decide when you are in the appropriate financial position to retire. The required nest egg advocated by the authors of these articles seems to vary a great deal. I've seen articles that recommend squirreling away up to eight times your current annual income before retiring. I'm not a financial consultant and I'm certainly not qualified to give anyone financial advice, but my wife and I have been retired or semi-retired for twelve or thirteen years and I've got to tell you that, if we had waited until we had eight times our annual income in the bank, we would still be working today.
My wife and I wrestled with the question of when we could afford to retire for years before we finally took the plunge. We read a lot of books and articles on the subject of retirement, but got conflicting advice there. The only folks we knew who had been retired for awhile and might be able to offer practical advice from someone who was walking the walk were our parents. However, after talking with them about the subject we discovered that neither my parents nor my wife's did a lot of retirement planning. They either decided that they were going to retire at a certain age or just did it on the spur of the moment. After looking at the way our parents went about it we decided that we didn't want to follow either of their paths to retirement. My mom and dad never earned much and they never seemed to need to own many things or do much of anything besides hang around the house. They managed to pay their house off before retirement and to save a little bit as well, but it wasn't much. They lived entirely on my dad's pension because he was a federal worker who neither paid into nor drew from social security and my mom didn't work long enough to draw social security either. Even so they lived in their own house until my dad was gone and my mom only had a few months to live. My wife's parents were sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum. They both worked, often more than one job at a time, and retired when they were each able to draw social security in addition to pension income. At times during their retirement they owned their own home and at times they rented and they spent all of their income enjoying life as much as possible. Eventually they could no longer buy a house and ended up in their later days with lots of memories but few possessions.
After a lot of thought on the subject my wife and I decided that the key to retirement was to maintain a balanced lifestyle. We wanted to enjoy life right now rather than spending all of our time building a nest egg or guarding it so that we would have plenty of money for our old age; but we realized that tomorrow would probably get here eventually and we would need some money to live on when that happened. We also realized that most people are never going to be healthier or feel better than they do at the current moment. So, if we were going to do something, there would never be a better time to do it than right now.
Based on what we wanted our remaining years to be like we decided that, rather than waiting until some set of conditions were met and then making a knife-switch jump into retirement, we would sort of ease into it as soon as the opportunity presented itself. My wife almost immediately made the transition by quitting her job and starting a small home-based business that provided less income but more free time. It took me a few more years to ease into retirement. The company I worked for had begun to offer early retirement packages and eventually I was able to qualify for one. After that I spent about seven years working at a variety of jobs from stocking shelves at Wal~mart to plying my pre-retirement skills at startup companies and state agencies. Eventually I quit working entirely. By that time my wife had closed her business. Neither of us was old enough for social security at that time so we cashed in some small IRAs, scrimped a lot and got by on savings and annuities. That was clearly not the best thing to do from a financial perspective, as any financial adviser would tell you, but we were ready to retire full-time, so we did it.
One of the first things we realized when we started the transition to retirement was that we wouldn't have as much disposable income as we would like to have had. I think that's one of the keys to retirement: Unless you are at the high end of the income scale and have a lot of money saved and/or some kind of annuity, you're lifestyle is probably not going to be the same as it was when you were working full time. That's the only way we were able to get through the period between when I retired full time and when I was able to draw social security. Getting by on less doesn't mean you have to live in a cardboard box though. What it does mean is that you have to make some decisions about what's important to you and how to live the lifestyle you are comfortable with using the resources you have available to you.
The income that my wife and I have from social security and other annuities is not enough to support the lifestyle we want to live. So early on we estimated how long we will live and we budget the money we draw from savings to supplement our income so that it will last for that period of time. When it comes to savings we view our house as just another nest egg. So we have no qualms about leveraging it's value to borrow money when we need it. That sort of goes against the philosophy some of our friends have. They want to leave their house and in some cases other savings to their kids. We have always raised our kids to be independent and self-sufficient so when we made the decision to retire at a relatively young age we also decided that if there was anything left for the kids when we passed away that was great, but ensuring a large estate for our kids to inherit was not going to be one of our priorities. That sounds cold to some folks, but it definitely makes it easier to enjoy your retirement years.
One consequence of easing into retirement is that you get to define what retirement means to you. So you may decide that you will never completely retire, at least as retirement is conventionally defined. You may always need some kind of supplemental income, especially if the social security coffers get as empty as many pundits have predicted. Some retirees work simply to get health insurance, which is an expense you have to consider when you define what retirement means to you. It may also be the case, especially if you are widowed, that you may want to work just to keep busy and have some contact with other people. The good news here is that many places hire older workers these days, especially for part time and relatively low income jobs that wouldn't support a person with a family to raise but work out well for retirees.
In any case, if you are willing to adjust your lifestyle to whatever your income and savings, properly budgeted, can support then you may find that you can retire much sooner than the experts would advise.
So as I see it, you can probably retire sooner than you think if do the following things:
The bottom line is that it's your life and you get to define what retirement means to you and how and when you will do it.
Lately it seems that I've been reading a lot of articles on the subject of retirement. A lot of them are intended to help you decide when you are in the appropriate financial position to retire. The required nest egg advocated by the authors of these articles seems to vary a great deal. I've seen articles that recommend squirreling away up to eight times your current annual income before retiring. I'm not a financial consultant and I'm certainly not qualified to give anyone financial advice, but my wife and I have been retired or semi-retired for twelve or thirteen years and I've got to tell you that, if we had waited until we had eight times our annual income in the bank, we would still be working today.
My wife and I wrestled with the question of when we could afford to retire for years before we finally took the plunge. We read a lot of books and articles on the subject of retirement, but got conflicting advice there. The only folks we knew who had been retired for awhile and might be able to offer practical advice from someone who was walking the walk were our parents. However, after talking with them about the subject we discovered that neither my parents nor my wife's did a lot of retirement planning. They either decided that they were going to retire at a certain age or just did it on the spur of the moment. After looking at the way our parents went about it we decided that we didn't want to follow either of their paths to retirement. My mom and dad never earned much and they never seemed to need to own many things or do much of anything besides hang around the house. They managed to pay their house off before retirement and to save a little bit as well, but it wasn't much. They lived entirely on my dad's pension because he was a federal worker who neither paid into nor drew from social security and my mom didn't work long enough to draw social security either. Even so they lived in their own house until my dad was gone and my mom only had a few months to live. My wife's parents were sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum. They both worked, often more than one job at a time, and retired when they were each able to draw social security in addition to pension income. At times during their retirement they owned their own home and at times they rented and they spent all of their income enjoying life as much as possible. Eventually they could no longer buy a house and ended up in their later days with lots of memories but few possessions.
After a lot of thought on the subject my wife and I decided that the key to retirement was to maintain a balanced lifestyle. We wanted to enjoy life right now rather than spending all of our time building a nest egg or guarding it so that we would have plenty of money for our old age; but we realized that tomorrow would probably get here eventually and we would need some money to live on when that happened. We also realized that most people are never going to be healthier or feel better than they do at the current moment. So, if we were going to do something, there would never be a better time to do it than right now.
Based on what we wanted our remaining years to be like we decided that, rather than waiting until some set of conditions were met and then making a knife-switch jump into retirement, we would sort of ease into it as soon as the opportunity presented itself. My wife almost immediately made the transition by quitting her job and starting a small home-based business that provided less income but more free time. It took me a few more years to ease into retirement. The company I worked for had begun to offer early retirement packages and eventually I was able to qualify for one. After that I spent about seven years working at a variety of jobs from stocking shelves at Wal~mart to plying my pre-retirement skills at startup companies and state agencies. Eventually I quit working entirely. By that time my wife had closed her business. Neither of us was old enough for social security at that time so we cashed in some small IRAs, scrimped a lot and got by on savings and annuities. That was clearly not the best thing to do from a financial perspective, as any financial adviser would tell you, but we were ready to retire full-time, so we did it.
One of the first things we realized when we started the transition to retirement was that we wouldn't have as much disposable income as we would like to have had. I think that's one of the keys to retirement: Unless you are at the high end of the income scale and have a lot of money saved and/or some kind of annuity, you're lifestyle is probably not going to be the same as it was when you were working full time. That's the only way we were able to get through the period between when I retired full time and when I was able to draw social security. Getting by on less doesn't mean you have to live in a cardboard box though. What it does mean is that you have to make some decisions about what's important to you and how to live the lifestyle you are comfortable with using the resources you have available to you.
The income that my wife and I have from social security and other annuities is not enough to support the lifestyle we want to live. So early on we estimated how long we will live and we budget the money we draw from savings to supplement our income so that it will last for that period of time. When it comes to savings we view our house as just another nest egg. So we have no qualms about leveraging it's value to borrow money when we need it. That sort of goes against the philosophy some of our friends have. They want to leave their house and in some cases other savings to their kids. We have always raised our kids to be independent and self-sufficient so when we made the decision to retire at a relatively young age we also decided that if there was anything left for the kids when we passed away that was great, but ensuring a large estate for our kids to inherit was not going to be one of our priorities. That sounds cold to some folks, but it definitely makes it easier to enjoy your retirement years.
One consequence of easing into retirement is that you get to define what retirement means to you. So you may decide that you will never completely retire, at least as retirement is conventionally defined. You may always need some kind of supplemental income, especially if the social security coffers get as empty as many pundits have predicted. Some retirees work simply to get health insurance, which is an expense you have to consider when you define what retirement means to you. It may also be the case, especially if you are widowed, that you may want to work just to keep busy and have some contact with other people. The good news here is that many places hire older workers these days, especially for part time and relatively low income jobs that wouldn't support a person with a family to raise but work out well for retirees.
In any case, if you are willing to adjust your lifestyle to whatever your income and savings, properly budgeted, can support then you may find that you can retire much sooner than the experts would advise.
So as I see it, you can probably retire sooner than you think if do the following things:
- Define what retirement means to you.
- Decide what lifestyle you have to have to make life worth living.
- Decide what kind of estate you really have to leave behind.
- Take stock of your resources and try to make an honest estimate of how long it will be before you are in a nursing home or in the ground.
- If you can live the lifestyle you need to have with the income you will have, supplemented by your savings over the remaining years of your active life, then you're in good shape.
- If not then you will either have to work full time until you have enough put back to get by or else work full or part time at something during your retirement years.
The bottom line is that it's your life and you get to define what retirement means to you and how and when you will do it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)