Posted on 06/25/2018 4:28:51 PM PDT by A Cyrenian
I have my health insurance issue solved. I think I have enough money save (who knows how much you need). It is what it is and I'm as ready as I'm going to be.
For those of you who are retired or have recently retired. Can you send some tips my way?
Any and all notes will be appreciated and heavily considered.
Thanks to you all for your help.
Peace be with you.
You have already gotten more good advice than I received when my retirement started after 37 years.....in 2007. My only add to all the rest would be to find a financial manger with a good track record. Turns out that my luckiest move was to sign on with a local firm in Loveland, Colorado. My advisor started in the business to save his parents in their retirement starting year and has been at it about 30 years now with many very happy clients. Don’t think I can list his id / company here but I’ll send you a personal if you would like.
Thankfully this December will be my 15th year of retirement, so I've already got my own set of responses for people who try to bother me. Brought a lot of them with me from the job.
Great recommendation.
I see my grandson 4-5 days a week, he will be a second grader when school starts.
For those retiring from the federal government, make sure you have 4-5 months of bills in the bank prior to retiring. OPM will take their sweet time, and will likely screw up the file at least once. My wife retired at the end of last month, and she's still waiting on her payment for accrued leave.
If you are planning on applying for a home equity loan, do it at least three months before you retire, to let the process work, and save everyone from the extra stress of getting it funded before you retire. However, it's a relief that ours is funded in time to proceed with several remodeling projects and a new roof (thanks to being hit with baseball size hail a few weeks ago).
If you were in the military prior to working as a federal civilian employee, pay off your military deposit before you retire. If you don't, you risk losing the value for retirement of the time you spent in the military. In my case, my 8 years in the Army is over $800 a month for the rest of my life.
In 18 months, the earnings limitation for SS goes away, but I have no desire to return to accounting. I'll give substitute teaching a whirl, perhaps getting a history degree.
My wife has been on edge for the past month, fretting over our financial situation...needlessly. I finally sat her down, laid out our income and current expenses. It opened her eyes, as what she thought was a deficit turned out to be a surplus of about $1500 a month. That will be diminished when school starts, as our youngest son has two more years of high school, and he's in the marching band, football, and basketball.
Having said all that, I am happy to report "retirement is underrated!" lol
I’ll be 67 on Wednesday (God willing).
I think I want to work 4 or 5 more years.
I’m waiting till 70 to start social security to max it out.
No debt.
We get paid 26 times per year - so I’m looking at 100 more paychecks.
Spam - not bad if it’s fried Spam. Breakfast w/Spam as breakfast meat, lunch w/fried spam sandwiches, dinner you’re an your own with imagination. Spam with pineapple and glaze, grilled...you get the idea. Spam w/spaghetti sauce, who knew! Search engines will be most helpful in finding new ways to cook and serve for dinner. In some places, you’d be eating ‘gourmet’
I.play golf 5 times a week read 4 books a week watch 3 movies,a day working on my 3000 day weekend income and net worth has risen each of the last 7 years I am 63
I'm into my sixth month of that. I sold my practice, house, and am housesitting for an elderly couple that has another house in Florida. I've just worked around the place cleaning it up and maintaining the house and grounds. Just clearing out my head on what direction I am going next. Medicare kicks in next month. The recommendation to write down expenses is important. I blew thru $5K in one month pissing it away before I began budgeting.
Doctor said I had excellent health.
Who needs insurance? If it is really bad, you only have 6 months left anyways.
Avoid bad JUJU. I think that is the best part of it all. I loved what I did, solving problems and creating new ways of doing things better and teaching people willing and able to learn. I’m a hard core engineer with a lot of hard work nuts and bolts experience at the coal face. What I don’t miss though is needless drama that wasted lots of motion and created lots of problems. That is just the way people are. Just a few of the things I remind myself I don’t miss:
Three hours of windshield time every work day
Type As and want to bes and later female types of the same kind. It wasn’t the want to get things done type A so much as the posturing to prove who has the biggest package. Like bulls in my pasture.
Arguing passionately and bitterly about how to do something that accomplishes the same thing because it is your way. If it will work well leave it up to the guy who has to get the job done. There are a lot of people who never understand that they are just not that important.
How can so many people see the very same set of facts and draw so many different conclusions? Experience and agendas. That is how. I wish I had a nickel for every manager that got bit once upon a time and swears he will never do _____ again and it does not matter one whit that he does not understand the reason why it happened or why it probably won’t happen again.
Turf battles and posturing
Bullshit budget battles where some SOB wants something done for nothing. Good, Fast, Cheap... Pick two and let’s get on with it. This includes champagne taste on a beer budget.
Easily bruised egos leading to vindictive actions.
It was good that I was a consultant for the last half of my career, a guy hired for what he knew and ability to get things done. I was able to avoid or live on the edges of most of the social engineering stuff and my world was much better for it. However, it was becoming unavoidable near the end of my tenure. I would not allow myself to be in any situation with a female without several witnesses. I needed to get out when I did before I told someone what I really thought more than I showed it already. Expecting everyone to do what they said they would do and calling them out on it when they didn’t made lots of them really really angry, so did calling out liars, cheats, thieves and excuse makers.
People who thought they needed to be informed but never understood and just didn’t want to be left out.
I could tolerate incompetence and even laziness so long as I could find it something harmless to do since 20% of the troops do more than 80% of the worthwhile work.
That is a start of my list of bad JUJU but just about everything falls into those and an even smaller set of categories of mostly just little minded and insecure average people.
One day my hired hand here at the farm was telling me some who hit John story about a guy who lost it all because he got too full of himself. I held up my hand to stop, walked out in the barnyard, motioned him to follow me. I pointed down the road and asked him what he saw. The front gate to the farm is what I was pointing at. I told him all the troubles of the world that aren’t mine have to be invited past the front gate and this was not one of them. I’m trying to hold on to that in my retirement. I’m still struggling with my new life. Thank the Lord I have lots of things to do that I enjoy other than my previous work.
“It is also important to save and invest 10-20% of your paycheck while one is working. Over 40 years a person should have saved enough to retire. It is a scary proposition to have to save up enough to last your family for 30 years+.”f
I tell people 25% and hope that is enough. We saved much more than that for many years and I still hope it is enough. This is a brave new world we boomers are in.
Good luck.
Those on our own PAY and PAY and PAY! It is the biggest single part of our budget and the one we get the least out of.
I'll tell you honestly, it would drive me crazy if I didn't have some work now....not used to having husband around ALL THE DANG TIME...
it seems a lot of freepers are govt retirees...
Yeah. I just threw that percentage range out there because I did not save a fixed percentage. As I got a pay raise at least half of it went to savings. So my savings rate would increase from 10% to 11% to 13% to 15% etc. By the time I retired with 40 years service I was up to about 30%. However in my first 15 years of working it was a struggle to save anything. So the bulk of my savings happened over the last 25 years. I was usually fully invested in stocks.
I bailed out of the market once which was a mistake and a lesson learned. Rode out 2008 and came back from that good. It wasn’t easy. It’s never easy.
I recite this story to young people every chance I get. Ratcheting up one’s percentage saved every year is a technique that works. I had to blitz savings during the last 25 years to make up for the first 15 years. Had I started that plan earlier it would have been much easier.
Built a workshop, started woodturning and wood crafting, have not looked back.
Have you looked into this: (h/t fireman15)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3666015/posts?page=52#52
bkmk
Get ready to be asked to volunteer time constantly, constant calls from ROBO calls for ins of all types, car warranty, financial planners.
BIG LESSON if you don’t already do it LEARN TO COUPON to stretch your $$. Use Salvation Army for clothes if you can.
Replace or repair household items sooner than later, make sure house is as weather proof as you can make it. Same goes for Car. Get a new 1 with the bells and whistles as the older you get the less you can see, and hear.
Make sure you have money set aside for Dental, hearing, and Vision health. As most ins don’t cover it or covers poorly.
When you write your Living Will or DNR be very specific on what you want tried.
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