Thanks Steve. Good idea all around.
when I retired at 53, I had an individual plan for $100/mo. I was stuck in a miserable job situation with lots of layoffs happening and thought I was stuck to maintain access to a group health plan. A colleague, who was retiring with access to a better plan, told me they found a better plan for less money on the individual market. It was a game changer. I also realized, after running the numbers in various scenarios, that you don't really need a million dollars to retire. I'm thrifty and have no debt. I was able to ride out the recession while also traveling and grow the money I had. The ACA came into play about the time that I needed a change to that individual plan. That worked until Medicare.
You have choices; remember that when your boss is getting to you. If your financial guy says you have enough, plus the future inheritance, but especially being able to make 6 figures in 16 weeks as a back up; you can retire. If you can make enough to cover your annual expenses in a few months; why not? The question is do you want to?
I retired four years ago at age 56 (along w/ my wife, same age); no pension, no retirement medical benefits, just our retirement savings. It's all in the planning, and we had a great financial planner that helped us out. We knew going in that healthcare would be our biggest expense in retirement and it has been -- by far. We made a very conservative retirement plan: allowing large margins for our spending plans, and using the "significantly below average market conditions" assumptions for predicting portfolio performance. We would have annual reviews with our advisor, and one year his first question for us was, "Why are you still working?" We were at the point where our (very conservative) retirement plan was funded to the point of being greater than a 95% chance of success. So we pulled the trigger.
I retired at 58, after 35 years at a large company. The timing was great. The company was still offering a corporate sponsored retiree medical plan. That disappeared shortly after I left. They were still offered a pension plan. That's gone now too, replaced by a lump sum plan. They're still paying me from a health reimbursement account, which covers some of the medical insurance. New retirees just get a lump sum. I could have made considerably more money by staying until 65, but I knew I'd have enough. It's been 18 years and I never regretted it.
Don't try to replicate the structure, it is an artificial control mechanism designed to provide productive output for the organisation, not to meet the needs of the human body and mind. Allow yourself the luxury of deciding if your body and brain really are suited to that approach and allow things to evolve over a few years and feel free to change it as and when you want.
I'm going to go one further - you never know when you'll have an accident, a health status change, whatever - don't put off everything till you retire, even if you're pretty sure you can retire early. Work Life balance - use your vacation time at work, figure out flex time or WF where you are, look for jobs that don't expect you 24/7/365 or even "fight" to take 1 week. My dad had a massive heart attack and quadruple bypass at 60. My mom is fighting colon cancer at 65. My dad was lucky, he got 23 more years and was able to do many things and a few trips till he was about 75. My mom has a good prognosis and is supposed to finish up this year with treatment - we're crossing our fingers. That said, I have old highschool friends who are basically bed bound from odd fluid retention diseases and no healthcare access, my younger sister has some chronic exhaustion where she can't get out of bed for a day or two plus migraines, She has friends from college who are basically disabled from an untreated fructose allergy. These are people in their late 30s.
We went on the state teachers retirement health insurance. It was not very good and cost quite a lot more than we had been paying and was not suitable for traveling. We were relieved when we aged into Medicare after ten years on the plan, but the state teachers supplement plan was pretty bad too. Anyhow, I figure that in the year 2000, we had to budget $10000 each for medical expenses, insurance, copays, prescriptions , out of pocket expenses.
) Car payment? Haven't made one since 2003. Mortgage? Small one kept deliberately to act as a block for housing identity theft protection (a quirk in Texas law, not applicable anywhere else). It was taken out against the paid for house, with the amount used to buy an investment, (which has over tripled since then). I have always been substituting capital for cash flow, so in retirement, I need little cash flow. Utilities, food, gasoline, annual house taxes (which are frozen), various insurances (house, car, and health) and a $260 mortgage. Everything else is luxuries, for which I can spend as much, or as little, as I please (other than the timeshare MFs) from my monthly budget. Any major purchase from from my capital investment. As for cashflow, I bought 3000 shares of Altria (the old Phillip Morris) for the dividend. It is now slightly over $1000 a month, tax free because it is inside the Roth IRA. (And I don't pay any income tax. My taxable income comes in at under the standard deduction, so no taxes owed. Bonus for playing the game and winning. . . )
After talking with many people about retirement, I have found that retirement can look very different from person to person. Some, like @klpca want defined routines in their day-to-day life, some are more flexible; some need to work on goals or a project or retire "into something else", whereas others are happy to take things as they come with no real plan.
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