… Absolutely! I wish I retired 5 years earlier.
intercst
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Ditto!
My own fault. I overestimated the cost of retirement.
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What a piece of nonsense, defining monetary responsibility as mental illness.
Trenchrat used to say “there are no pockets in a shroud”, but his perspective was of a person still living some 15 years after the cancer experts at Sloan Kettering said he had 6 months to live.
I have been retired for 12 years. After that period living off the stack, it has grown. But I plan on cracking 100, thirty years from now. And I have spelled out the several ways we Proles could be robbed by a Shiny government, so that the “JCs” can be better cared for. I want for nothing, but I will not spend just because I can.
Steve
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We were hiking in the White Mountains in NH when we were 59. My wife and I had mountain experience but those were more demanding than we had run into. All the next school year I kept thinking about how hard they had been, how many more places I wanted to see, and how my body was not getting younger. Over the next spring vacation we ran our numbers and decided that we could get by comfortably If we retired.
It was not only one of the best financial decisions we ever made. It was the best personal decision we could have made.
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As an artist, I deal with small waves of stress. It does not matter much. I reorganize.
The idea is to set in motion art with a flow of income. I like the chase.
As mi Irish Grandmother would say, “What else would you be doing”?
My dad retired a few years ago at 82. The best thing for him was to work. He had wonderful vacations as he wanted with Mom. They went to India, Israel, Turkey, Greece and elsewhere across Europe.
Now Dad and Mom have nap time 2 pm to 4 pm every day, unless they are out for a late lunch by themselves or with friends.
I expect to work to 70 minimally, but my earnings could be royalties. Earned income without lifting a finger.
Cost of private insurance continues to be the major impediment to hastened gratification. If my wife was not subject to a 40% reduction in her pension for early retirement and if we could buy into Medicare now, I think we would be done in the next two years (after my youngest goes to college).
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Nothing new in the article really. Life is a tightrope of planning like you will live forever but live like you may die tomorrow.
We use the good china for any occasion. Open the good bottle of wine and/or bourbon. Plant a tree that I may or may not be around to see at full maturity. Have a reasonably healthy lifestyle with good genetics but could be killed by the drunk texting driver.
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I didn’t and knew that I could have retired many years before I did. I kept asking myself why not, but I always said that I’d give it just one more year. I can only put it down to my childhood and early life. We were poor, not just poor but really poor, and lived in a miner’s cottage something like this, three generations of us as i recall:
I’ve always had a dread of being poor and that’s what kept my nose to the grindstone for so long. Stupid and irrational; I see it now but didn’t then unfortunately.
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True, but let’s also acknowledge the fact that there is significant asymmetry in the two “harms.”
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