My husband “retired” a year ago January. Not his choice, he wanted to work an additional year.
But the difference in him has been positive. The stress is gone. There are down times but that’s ok and he has felt no yearning to do consulting work even though it would be easy to do.
He was a very committed employee, it was difficult to take time off when no one is doing your job when you are gone. It’s been amazing for our marriage in that my husband is happier. Easier to get along with. His temper and demeanor is changed for the better.
Not his choice but I have nothing but positive things to say. I haven’t worked for money for a few years. We are enjoying this phase.
It’s also allowed us to travel. Take care of aging parents. Visit our granddaughter. Help our daughter through her cancer treatment. If he was still working, I would be doing that alone. He wouldn’t have forged a bond with our daughter who now calls him to ask for job advice.
It’s hard to say when to retire. But i think that we as humans are afraid of the unknown. It takes a while to get used to the new reality. But it’s ok to make the choice you want.
Our financial advisor gave us the tools that we were going to be ok. Financially. We are lucky. We have retiree health benefits which help tremendously to bridge the gap until Medicare.
The can be an advantage to having one spouse retire earlier than the other. In our case, hubby (7 years older) retired at age 64 and then went on my medical insurance. The next year I retired at age 58.
During that transition year, I was working a really stressful tech job which often involved page-outs and offshift work. But I was sometimes in my home office, nice to have a lunch date now and then. And he knew it was only fair for him to do most of the grocery shopping and cooking. We had planned some grand travel during that time, but Covid interrupted. He had two Europe trips with brothers (with inheritance money) that year. It was great to see his stress level drop dramatically.
I quit my job because I was overworked, underpaid and under appreciated. I expected to take some time to unwind & then find a job that wasn’t so overwhelming. This was 3.5 years ago. I have lost 30 pounds, my stress level is way down, and I am much less grumpy than I was when working in that job. I have had a number of unexpected things in my life that have filled my time, and I honestly haven’t felt like looking for another job yet. It took me a long time to admit that I’m actually retired, and although I embrace it, I won’t say that I will never work again. I am open to working down the road if something comes my way that meets my expectations. If you decide to leave your job, it doesn’t need to mean that you’re retired … unless you decide that you want it to. And even then, you can always change your mind at any point.
DH is still working, but my retirement is part of a longer term plan to get him out of the workforce. His company financial planner said he should work until he was 70, because at 65 there was only a 90% chance we’d have money still at 95. This struck me as both a bad bargain and poor advice.
OP, ask yourself why you want to work, not why you want to downshift. (I found downshifting a easier term to accept) There’s no requirement to work until we fall apart (mentally or physically) if it isn’t a financial issue. I told people that the world doesn’t need another clerk, but it definitely needs another volunteer. Ymmv.
It’s very conservative in that it uses an underperforming market.
Fidelity has a more complicated model if you are their customer. The only way we even come close to using up all of our money is if the market is significantly below historical averages. And it doesn’t take into consideration that our spending will probably decline for awhile before end of life expenses and doesn’t account for any assets that we have. Even below average markets gives us a nice nest egg to pass on to our heirs.
It’s hard to decide but at some point I have to believe that we have enough for the rest of our lives. And that we don’t do anything stupid like gamble our life savings away.
I pretty much retired when Covid hit and I didn’t go back to school due to our helping take care of FIL.
This year I went back for a few days after the office called over the summer asking if I wanted to officially retire and I wasn’t sure. Now I’m pretty sure.
I enjoy retirement - lack of stress, lack of schedule, carefree days, etc. H is looking forward to being able to retire too - hopefully in 2025 or 2026. I wish he could do it now, but we’re not quite there yet financially. Close though. We’re both in our later 50s.
It took me three years to realize I wanted to actually retire though, so I understand the indecision. I also can’t say what I feel is what you will feel, but I know it’s right for me. If we ever quit traveling so much I’ll probably volunteer in a few places, but right now, we’re enjoying traveling a bit (since H can work partially remotely).
Seems like that could be important to many who consider retirement before Medicare age, since the available ACA plans in some areas may be limited (and expensive for age 60-64 if you cannot keep your investment income low enough to be subsidized). Though that is at least better than the pre-ACA situation where many would not be able to buy any individual medical insurance at any price.
I completely get why you might hesitate to leave a job you enjoy. When I returned to paid work after several years as a SAHM, I had a job I loved. I really, really did. I did not plan to retire until my late 60’s. Unfortunately, something happened which caused me to change positions to one I didn’t like as well (long painful story) and the feeling was gone. So I retired earlier than planned.
But I do understand the feeling of enjoying what you do, the satisfaction of a job well done and earning money. I enjoyed all of those. Your feelings that way are perfectly valid.
Be aware that if/when you retire you will have time to fill. Like many of us here, being busy raising a family and working left little time for hobbies, but now might be a good time to start to think about what you might be interested in. I actually created a document listing some things I wanted to try exploring. Some worked out and some didn’t.
I don’t know if there is a perfect answer here. but any choice will have it’s pros and cons. There is no “wrong” decision.
From the financial perspective, I am inclined to be very cautious. We are in unusual financial times. The market might look shaky over the past few years. However, if you look at the market from 1980 to now, we have had a huge uptrend. It is at least possible that the market might still be significantly overvalued on a very long term basis. Of course prior to retirement we should all move quite a bit of our funds from the stock market to something that resembles bonds. However, the money supply has increased a great deal over the years and inflation is a possibility. Finally, when us baby boomers have finished retiring this will have an impact on the economy and markets (and has already had an impact).
Generally I think that caution is appropriate in investment matters.
Then there is the question of what do you want to do with your time?
Work is not just for money. It also is a way to sort of set a structure to a person’s life. After retirement we have more freedom and more time to do what we want. Figuring out what that is might not be as easy as some might expect.
I retired a few years back (before my youngest started university). I had been wondering about it for a while. Medical issues sort of gave me a big nudge. Since then doctors and other medical professionals have done a very good job of giving me the expectation of a lot more time with much better health than I could have expected.
One thing that I have done since retiring is to continue to work part time for my former employer. At one level I am helping to make sure that the next two generations of workers are really fully ready to take over from what I used to do. I have found even a moderate amount of work to be worthwhile. I do not do it for the money. I do it to keep my mind active and to help where I can.
As I said upstream. I loved my job. I believe I was well regarded…and did the job well. I wanted to retire while I was still feeling the same way, and others felt the same about me. I didn’t want to hang around too long.
Doing some leave work once a year or so was fun. I still occasionally see private students. I’m speaking at a professional conference in a couple of weeks.
I have never been bored, and I am as busy as I want to be!
My SIL retired from teaching, because being a kindergarten teacher is rough on a person in their 60’s. She did long term subbing for awhile, but finally had to give it up due to her health. She found that she needed structure to her days, though - she was sleeping and watching tv in bed way too often. She got a low-stress job that worked very well for her for awhile . MIL moved to an AL near SIL a year ago, so SIL quit her job. She said that she had wanted to quit for awhile, but she didn’t want to go back to her unstructured days. Now she spends a few hours every day with her mom. I think it’s going to be tough on her to have wide-open days once her mom is gone. SIL is in her 70’s, so she may not want to work. Hopefully, she can find some sort of fulfilling, low stress volunteer work. I think it’s good that she’s honest about needing structure.
We wanted to be sure, realllly sure, that we had enough money to cover retirement, travels, medical coverage. So we did work longer than the financial planner said was necessary. That buffer makes this market downturn less stressful to us.
If we were in need of extra money, I would have eagerly applied for part time job at the library. On NextDoor somebody was trying to drum up interested for 3 part time positions at $18/hour. I do have plenty of spare time, but what one of the cherished things in my retirement is calendar flexibility.
10 years ago I couldn’t wait to retire. I was working to support my lifestyle. I was working very long hours and didn’t particular enjoy what I was doing. Few years ago I came back to a company I was at 20 years ago. For some reason the job just clicked with me. I am doing something I like, I get along with my manager(s) very well and my company is pretty much letting me do what I like. I work from home 4 days a week and my day ends around 4. I have over 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick days. Last year I ran out of vacation time and my boss said to just take the extra days.
I am now rethinking about my retirement because I do enjoy my work and it keeps me current. I guess the sad thing is I don’t really have any hobbies outside of travel and my family.
If I didn’t like what I am doing I would retire as soon as I could. Life is too short.
OP here. Thank you to all for the feedback, as I really appreciate the different viewpoints and experiences that have been shared. And I agree with all of them! Therein lies my problem. To answer some of the questions that were raised:
Our approach to finances is overly conservative, so I feel quite confident that it isn’t an issue. Our advisor is pretty fiscally conservative too, so the fact that I have his go-ahead really alleviates any concerns. We also don’t have to worry about elder care for our parents: one set has saved enough to cover any assisting living or long-term care that they might need without any help from us and the other set have already passed. However, DH is an independent contractor so our health insurance is covered through my job which is one of the reasons why I am continuing to work.
So from that perspective, even if I could convince my employer to let me go part-time (which I still think is very unlikely because of the nature of my position), I’d have to still do 30 hours (4 days/week) to keep my insurance coverage. A reasonable question might be that if I’m so confident that finances won’t be a problem if I retire, then why do I even care about the health insurance part? The answer is that I am full of contradictions!
We’ve worked pretty hard throughout the years to ensure that we saved more than we spent, which helped us get to the privileged place that we currently are at and it’s really hard to change years of conditioning. The idea of looking for insurance through the open exchange is kind of daunting too, and it would be 100% up to me to do that (DH is not helping there).
And I very much worry that I am someone who needs some structure to my day.
On the travel question, DH would do some traveling with me, but he is likely going to keep working for a while. So any other trips I do would be with other friends (which DH is totally on board with), as I’m not interested in traveling by myself.
It’s a tough call. If you want to travel, and your husband doesn’t retire, will you travel on your own, or with friends?
I retired in 2021 at age 58, as did my husband. Haven’t noticed it too much financially since we have a decent pension, and when you’re working, you pay a gazillion different taxes that eat away at the actual take home pay, plus you’re not putting anything into 401K.
My reasoning was that I’ve been living out of a suitcase for 37 years. Always had one partially packed. Before you know it, four months would go by and I realized that I didn’t remember much of it because I spent many of those nights in a hotel. Life was just whizzing by. Plus, I wanted some decent sleep. Plans were to travel a lot and do some athletic things. My husband had a list of hundreds of projects and interests.
As far as how it’s worked so far, well, it’s been great for my husband. He’s always been too busy to work. For me, it’s taken some time. My purpose was to take care of my kids and to work. And work. I liked my job. Most of the travel hasn’t happened due to medical issues for us and my parents. It took awhile to not feel unsettled, but I’m definitely finding more things to do, and I sure do like the sleep. Time has slowed down. I’m glad to be retired now when I read about all the conflict and BS going on at my company, yikes, so there’s that!
Ah, you answered the travel question as soon as I submitted.
As far as health insurance, it is reasonable to be concerned. It sure isn’t cheap when you have to pay for it out of your own pocket. We ended up changing plans, but to keep what we had, we’d have to pay about $2500 per month. Think about paying that for several years, and even with plenty saved up, that’s a chunk of change. Plus, no doubt it will increase.
“If I’m so confident that finances won’t be a problem if I retire, then why do I even care about the health insurance part?”
Maybe it’s because health insurance could cost $25,000/couple annually… so your income will be lower and expenses higher. Or because you’ll miss the idea of one steady income. Of course the planner may have already addressed these factors in the assessment. But psychologically it can be hard.
Although this might not be relevant to OP, I will point out that we and many of our retiree friends have found it psychologically hard to switch to spend-down mode. We’ve been really good savers, and it’s a different mindset now. Not worried about running out of funds. Just not fully accustomed to this stage of life.
My husband retired a few years ago (not yet 65). Our experience in NJ (and we have friends in MA who have the same experience) is that because we have very low income the insurance premiums for the state plans are excellent (much lower than cobra or when my husband was employed and probably lower than they will be for Medicare.) So we are bridging the health insurance gap very inexpensively right now.
Let’s not forget that retirement is an option, not a requirement. Do so only if/when you’re ready, or not at all if you enjoy your work. If I had enjoyed working, I wouldn’t have retired.