Good article. We were good savers during our work years, but lived modestly in a 1952 ranch house that we updated during our 43 years in it, drove used cars, took economical but fun vacations, indulged our daughter’s passion for horses. It’s tough to adjust to a lower spending rate in retirement.
We are now in our early 70s and still trying to get our spending down to about 5% of our savings per year. We are cutting back on things. But we still have a fun 11 day trip in the Canadian Rockies planned for the first two weeks of September and are going to splurge at the Prince of Wales in Waterton, Chateau Lake Louise, and Banff Springs Hotel.
Fortunately, we are very happy with economical things like dinner parties, hiking, pickleball, enjoying nearby towns within 200 miles, meeting friends at the dog park, walks in town. We really enjoy taking our kids out to dinners and events. I took my son to the IndyCar race at Laguna Seca last weekend. Yesterday I took our oldest daughter and boyfriend to lunch at the “Sailing Goat” restaurant on the waterfront in Richmond, CA (highly recommended!) and we went to the “Rosie the Riveter” museum afterward.
My wife cashed in her accrued vacation when she retired and bought a used boat; we enjoy cruising around the lake with friends. The boat is expensive, but that’s another trade-off of joy versus penny pinching. My wife loved boating on Lake Tahoe when she was a girl and has always wanted a boat, but we could really never afford it while working. So we decided to indulge her life-long dream of boat ownership. There weren’t any lakes convenient to Silicon Valley for boating when we were working, but now that we have the lake place in North Idaho, it makes a lot more sense to have a boat.
I think we have retirement all figured out.
Everything in balance