Good advice. Thank you. It’s probably a good point that for US our expenses will be moderate. Traveling will be here and there, by choice not often. We do anticipate actually purchasing a home this year worth more than our current home (long story) but it is with $ secured from the sale of another property. Neither of us is really into things/toys and nature is our most favorite playground. I’m not high maintenance in $ terms and neither is H. He has a decent pension - it just doesn’t allow his wife to have health insurance! Lol.
I think I want the best of both worlds. And that is where I may land - with the first stage towards retirement going part time - and having more time to do the things I like and am interested.
And I guess there is nothing wrong with that!! Haven’t kept up with The Joneses so far - no need to start now!!!
The other thing that I think makes retirement (and life) is for you and your life partner to be on the same page. And like each other!
I have a family member going through a divorce after a long marriage because she couldn’t see spending the rest of her life with a person she didn’t have much in common with. I hope that both of them will find happiness and a partner who shares more in common with.
I think things are easy for me. I like my husband, we like doing things together and we importantly to me have similar ideas of how to spend and how to save our money.
We have friends and he retired after a long and successful career. He was looking forward to the freedom to travel, to do things on their own. As a couple. His wife, her plan is to watch the grandchildren. He loves his grandchildren but he didn’t envision him retiring to watch the grandkids full time. He complains about it all the time.
That’s just an example of different ideas of retirement
I’m enjoying retirement. But I’ll likely enjoy it more after Darned Covid is under control. On the plus side, last year I read 28 books (6 of them on the CC book club) and ran 350 miles ;).
Oh definitely. Everyone is very keen to point that out, especially now: MSN
Of course if it were universally agreed we’d have a crash then it would have already happened. The one time everyone is negative is usually the bottom (like in March 2020). Conversely if everyone is incredibly optimistic then that’s a sign we may be near the top.
Often what people have saved may not reflect amounts that they earned - someone with more modest earnings may have started saving early and had the time value of money, good purchases in real estate (modest home that got paid off), sought out reasonable returns (the draw downs and volatility of some investments can take away most of gains), also if there were broken marriages or kids that drained the coffers, living well above one’s means for many years, etc.
Of course many worry about the unknown like health care issues and costs. Most LTC (long term care) policies are limited – as the average time people live after qualifying for use of the policy is generally short – an exception is Dementia which can have a short or very lengthy period.
So many people have no ‘financial sense’ because of many reasons. Our son in law learned and continues to learn from DD - she taught him about how they with combined earnings could pay off his student loans and purchase the vehicles they needed (she was able to buy her grandparents’ vehicle when they went to one car from two, they replaced his very used car with a better used car) plus when they needed the 2 sliding door Sienna for 3 children under age 4 they found one and were able to buy with cash. They used Dave Ramsey principles as it was easy for SIL to listen to the lessons/read the books - and they had the budget meetings to get on track at the get-go.
My dad was successful at business - started almost at the ground up at age 33-- he had a big loan to pay off (mom inherited 1/3 of the business assets) the suddenly deceased 55 year old father in law’s construction business he was learning to manage after working as a mason) - the bankers didn’t know he was going to be successful, but my parents had enough assets for the bank to ‘take a chance’ - a small town so the bank would have gotten a lot of push back from the community, including the company’s workers who would have had to leave town to find equivalent jobs. Dad grew the business and developed real estate including apartment buildings well built that he then owned, and some very successful commercial real estate. He died too young - just before his 64th birthday of cancer. He had sold the construction business a few years earlier; parents had been traveling quite a bit since their mid-50’s, and were in comfortable position with enough to ‘stay busy’ with apartment property management. Dad would walk a few miles every day to get downtown to pick up a newspaper and then walk the few miles back - getting the sunshine and exercise. My brother helped with the property management after dad died, and all was sold when mom died at age 77.
We had a ‘state of the markets’ group meeting with our financial manager’s team presentation/overheads (they present twice a year) - I asked DH if he understood it, and he was able to follow along pretty well. I pick up what their analysis is and they also summarize what others are saying. We set up our individual meetings twice a year about a month after the ‘state of the markets’ so we can ask any further questions or get a bit of update of what has gone on with the markets since the presentation.
They explain from past events (big draw downs etc) how it would affect investments under various scenarios.
We had some interesting questions/comments from people in the audience that did know a lot about specific things – like Taiwan chip manufacturers setting up US and Canada plants, how Ford is getting US made chips to keep their new vehicles being completed, etc.
Some folks have skills and desire to try to optimize market trends. But I think it is OK to just pick an appropriate scheme (in consultation with financial advisor and/or retirement planning research) and then do occasional rebalance to stay on track.
Note - If you have decent pension(s)/SS that cover a big chunk of your retirement budget, that’s a nice perk…. less need to stress over the short term investment earnings.
The combination of declining world population, increasing scarcity of natural resources, climate change, demise of farms, political instability, etc. will bring the 25-year boom cycle to a quick halt.
Sounds like he’s trying to find himself a new audience of young doomsters, since that sounds like the sort of thing I hear from college kids. And give himself the ability to say “just wait and see” if a crash doesn’t happen soon, since none of these (barring the possible of “political instability” leading to military confrontation) will play out on a timescale of less than a decade.
Well, apparently the analysts were hoping to hear about new car models and sales projections, but instead they heard Elon’s ramblings about some robots taking place of human workers in the factories. Of a sudden, financials became important.
