<p>I took a few years of expenses from Quicken. I don’t categorize obsessively, but I know roughly what we spend on medicine, gas, clothing, tuition, dinners out, etc. I put that in a spreadsheet, and then figure which expenses would go up, stay flat, or go down in retirement. I do that at three levels: subsistence, okay-ish, and extravagant. </p>
<p>Close enough for me. </p>
<p>The other thing I do is use ESPlanner.com. I input the numbers and let it crank away. The Monte Carlo runs tell me what the 5th percentile living standard is likely to be, and I can live with it. The 50th percentile is pretty wonderful. Any better than that and the kids are likely to inherit a nice chunk. </p>
<p>I am both anal and a banker’s daughter. For the past 15 years, I have produced a monthly cash flow report to review with my husband that accounts for every penny in and every penny out every month, “categorized obsessively.” Technology has made this much easier to do now than when I started, and it’s been incredibly helpful in understanding exactly where our money goes and what we will need in retirement to maintain or increase our standard of living. I play around with those buckets a lot.</p>
<p>The expense that troubles me most for the future is health care. DH and I are both healthy with no chronic issues, but we don’t want to have to set aside a significant amount of money to account for uncertain health in the future. I posted earlier that we are looking to downsize and travel in the summers to escape the heat where we live but, partly, those travels will be to places outside the U.S. where the cost of living is attractive for Americans and where good health care is covered or heavily subsidized. We are seriously considering leaving the U.S. eventually to enjoy our golden years in a place where health care will not be a major expense. We have identified a few places to explore and will initially enjoy those excursions as vacation travel but, if we can find a place where we can live well, learn a new language, enjoy a new culture, and have access to good, inexpensive health care, we will seriously consider making that move.</p>
<p>Is anyone else considering leaving the country to get the most out of their retirement number?</p>
<p>In our simple life, we calculated our monthly expenses just by adding the credit card bill, cash withdrawals, and fixed expense like utilities. Add to that annual expense like taxes and insurances. I leave out future health expenses. It’s too murky. The expense was a bit more than I expected.</p>
<p>My husband calculates our daily spending by day, then determines what our monthly spending is. He has been doing this for years. It doesn’t take into account such pseudo fixed expenses like insurance and utilities, but it gives us a good idea of how we’re doing overall. Our younger son thinks this is silly, counting pennies like this, and says we should just attack it from the income angle, and work a little more.</p>
<p>OK, you’ve got me thinking I should start discussing monthly expenses with DH. I try to update him every 6 months or so on the investment/net worth side, but he really does not want to deal with it. I’ve been tracking spending for the last 3-4 years, and it’s always a little but not much higher than my tentative budget. Travel is the most volatile part of that. Not the big vacations, but the little side trips. Anyway, our monthly expenses are probably 50-100% above what DH would guess, so maybe he needs to start getting used to the size of the numbers. I don’t want either of us to end up being the grandparents who write a $10 check to grandkids for birthdays because our ideas about prices got frozen back in 1972.</p>
<p>I used my bank online to get all the expenses because I’ve pay everything online. However, I add health insurance and long term care because it’s taken out of the paycheck pretax. Then I add Medicare part B.</p>
<p>“We made the kids co executors” - Some of our friends went that route. We thought we would too but changed our minds. </p>
<p>Our situation is simple, so we recently rewrote our wills via a community class (canned forms… fill in the blank). The lawyer at class strongly discouraged co-executors. She said she’s seen too many families torn over this. So we made oldest kid (the one still in CO) the executor. </p>
<p>One thing we learned is that almost all our assets are set up to go first to spouse via beneficiary forms… then both kids once we are both gone. The rest would have same path via default state laws. But it still does seem best to have it in writing. </p>
<p>I could see a problem with two kids being co-executors, but if they are splitting everything equally, I’m not sure what could go wrong. We told our kids to just sell everything and if there’s one single penny left after they split it, they should either throw or give it away, or cut it in half. I can’t see either of them being sentimental about anything.</p>
<p>Our lawyer said that everything will go to whomever is listed as a beneficiary on an asset, regardless of the will, so for those assets we’d better make sure they reflect what we want.</p>
<p>They don’t have to be co executors, one is all you need but it’s divided evenly. My husband was executor of his parents will, they made years ago in 1980. But he moved here and he signed the executor over to his sister because she is over there and can deal with lawyer equally.</p>
<p>When I was executor, there were a plethora of documents that I had to get notarized at various times, and a number of trips to institutions presenting letters testamentary authorizing me to take action of some kind. If a co-executor who lived in a different state had also had to sign/authorize those actions, it would have been painfully hard. I can only imagine what the stock transfer agent would have required if there had been co-trustees; it was hard enough to jump through all those hoops when it was just me. </p>
<p>Brain health:
1. eat healthy; limit meat and fats; increase fiber, nuts , fruits and vegetables
2. don’t smoke or use drugs, limit alcohol to one drink a week
3. exercise daily at least 3 miles walking, try more, enter races for fun, keep BMI low
4. exercise the brain using the computer-use new technology, learn new programs , read, write, talk, go to lectures, take online courses
5. learn new things daily and ways to do them with a challenge - do things differently- try new challenges mentally
6. learn calming methods- self talk and relaxation
7. bring nature back to your life- commune
8. travel and learn new things, languages, smells, form new memories
9. enjoy varied people, learn from everyone you have contact with, nurture relationships
10. find your spirituality, learn to be outside your self , be altruistic </p>
<p>I was with you until the “limit alcohol to one drink per week”. Now that’s crazy talk.<br>
And spirituality? As a fairly Godless red wine drinker, I guess it’s all downhill for me. May as well just give in and have the bacon for breakfast, too. I’m not sure what spirituality has to do with brain health anyways.</p>
<p>My husband has bacon or sausage everyday with eggs. His bloodwork showed the same level as 20 years ago. I know of people who turned vegetarian and one died of both Parkinson and Alzeihmers disease. Not sure it was considered Lewd or not. The fact that the brain has 70% fat is one important reason not to go all vegetarian.</p>
<p>I’ve heard add of luminosity but not sure how that works. My husband likes bridge but I don’t like to play it, I wish there is something online.</p>
<p>‘What do YOU do to keep your brain healthy?’ was the question.</p>
<p>I stand corrected, I should have said on # 7 ‘my’ life, #9 learn from everyone ’ I ’ have contact with, # 10 find ‘my’ spirituality, learn to be outside ‘myself’. </p>
<p>I’m thinking of getting a brain teaser book. Perhaps to work through some math problems from the Art of solving problems. I used to do them for fun. One of my brother who tutored me math was number 6 in my country’s math competition.
I’m definitely going to learn Italian for my upcoming trip.</p>
<p>I have tried luminosity for months at my D1’s suggestion. It was the free version. I did see my weaknesses and strengths. It was fun but I got kind of tired of it, a little too repetitive and not challenging in enough diverse areas. CC is actually more challenging mentally.</p>
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