Don’t Waste Your Retirement
Financial websites that try to tell you when is the best time to retire will say that you should start considering retirement when you calculate that you have enough income, through some magical combination of pensions, Social Security and investment income, to finance your present lifestyle. Simple. Most of the numbers I have seen say, to maintain your present lifestyle, this number should be equal to your present income, minus expenses associated with working, plus maybe some extra money set aside to take “that once in a lifetime” vacation or to splurge on an expensive car. Huh? Wait. What?
To begin with, RETIREMENT SHOULD NOT BE ABOUT MAINTAINING LIFESTYLE. If retirement is about maintaining your present lifestyle, why even bother? Retirement should be about change, new opportunities and expanding your comfort zones. Not maintaining anything and certainly not sitting back and ruminating about the past. And a “once in a lifetime” vacation and a fancy car? YOU ARE RETIRING! What are you supposed to take this “once in a lifetime” trip and then come home, buy a fancy car, sit in an easy chair and reminisce about the time you went to France?
See also:
- What is the Cost to Retire Overseas?
- Life is Either a Daring Adventure or Nothing
- Eight Things I Ask Myself Before I Buy More Stuff
Retirement should simply be a new chapter, not the last thing we do in our lives. Retirement is time to reinvent yourself, try new things and reward yourself with time you didn’t have before. Hopefully, this will be high-quality time. If you want to travel, reward yourself by starting an open-ended adventure, not a “once in a lifetime” ANYTHING. If you can afford to retire in the United States, Europe or other developed countries, you can certainly become a wanderer, practically anywhere in the world, FOR AS LONG AS YOU CHOOSE. You can take up some new hobbies, expand your circle of friends, take up public speaking, run for office, learn to dance or take singing lessons. When determining when is the best time to retire, remember, retirement is a new beginning, do what you want, color outside of the lines. Again, to me, the big question about retirement is – why would you want to retire AND continue your present lifestyle?
There is a medical term called minimal effective dose. Simply stated it is the smallest amount of medicine required to produce the desired outcome. Again, there are a number of variables involved, but if you apply this minimal effective dose concept to retirement, it simply means get out as soon as you can afford to. Reducing spending means the dose can be smaller and you can spend less time in the “salt mine”. Continuing to blindly consume thinking consumerism will make you happy means more time until you can begin anew. I am not a financial advisor, but I can say with confidence that retirement is about choices and if out of fear or other unknowns, you choose to delay new beginnings, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR MOST PRECIOUS ASSET OF ALL – YOUR TIME. … and you can never get it back.
When is the Best Time to Retire
Agree 100%! I retired (real) early, and never looked back. Best decision I ever made. And yup, it was liberating to make decisions oftentimes on a whim like traveling someplace I’ve never been too. I like my NEW self ?
It’s really nice to see(read)that people can remain active and even change things in their lives later on! I wish my parents and people in their environment saw it like that instead of being idle and in my eyes waiting for death. But on the other hand, why would you wait until retirement to realize your dreams? There is plenty of ways to generate some income and frankly speaking many young people nowadays dont even plan retiring…:)
Our goal is to play for our kids college at an in state university so they don’t graduate with a ton of dept. our income doesn’t allow them to get any loans that don’t immediately require repayment upon dispersal. They also may need a place to stay for summers the first few years of school so we can’t sell our very modest house yet. It would cost us more to rent. Once they graduate we are gone, living in places for months at a time. Our expenses will be much less than they are currently-no cable, no dry cleaning, no car payments, no mortgage payments, less expensive meal option and more to cook than when we were working. It’s hard to imagine not doing something with my time as I discover my passions. Maybe volunteering at school or at hospitals. Currently we travel as much as we can both with and without the kids to indentify/rule. Out potential future bases.
Picking a time to retire is always a balancing act. I think you may find, I certainly have, that the cost to “maintain lifestyle” (although, why exactly would anyone want to do that?) can be much lower after retirement. When I evaluated it more closely, I was amazed at how much I paid to subsidize going to work!
One of the things I have discovered here in Europe is that post high school education is very cheap or free, and with universal healthcare, sometimes the decision to retire is much easier.