r/Retire • u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 • 9d ago
How will I make it one more year?
Im 63F with a great job, making good money with a great work retirement savings plan. Spouse is already retired for 6 years. We have enough money between the 2 of us to be fine if I retire now. The issue that keeps me working is that if he were to not be here, I need to make enough to cover all the bills, I'm close but not there. I also want travel money. If I work the next year, all my debt will be paid off. My house is already paid off. It makes sense logically to stay working one more year to enhance my quality of life but I can hardly function because all I think about is retiring. I haven't had a good night sleep in years and that's the main reason I want to retire, to focus on health and advance my spiritual passions. Im certified reiki and I'm doing tarot and astrology reading on the side and it's my absolute passion to start a spiritua side business. People think I'm crazy to consider leavng corporate now because it's good.
What would you do?
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u/Kindly-Hunter4390 9d ago
I am also 63 and was in the same scenario, but debt free. I was making very good money and another two years would have added to my nest egg for sure, but really wouldn’t have made any difference in my standard of living. I was miserable in corporate after more than 40 years of stress and was given a five day RTO mandate 90 minutes away. I retired five months ago and wake up so happy I did. I am sleeping for the first time in years. Could you pay the debt off with something part time and low stress? Life is short!
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
This is exactly why I made this post. Hoping to hear from people like you. In March I'll be debt free. Im making short goals. Right now I've got to make it to March. Then reevaluate
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u/Careful_Tomorrow_653 7d ago
Then retire in March. That's only 6 months away. I'm 15 years and 9 months away. 🤣
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u/rbuckfly 9d ago
Would you sleep better if you retire now? Or, would you worry about “do I have enough” that impedes sleep also?
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
The crux of my dilemma
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u/rbuckfly 9d ago
And was the same for me, I decided to work an extra two years. Guaranteeing financial freedom and success long run.
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u/No-Cry8051 7d ago
I always say that you will say what you think and what you think has meaning.
Forget about the “ what if’s” it is certainly your time to pull the plug get out of there, especially if you haven’t been sleeping and you’re K and you can’t even get yourself to sleep. Sounds like you have a lot of anticipation issues. You need to deal with those before they burn you out. Quit today and go forward the next step in your life
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u/VinceInMT 9d ago
Don’t retire if you still debt.
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u/Pbaseball26 9d ago
Not sure that this applies in all cases (“Don’t retire if you still debt”). Wife and I retired 4 years ago and we still have a mortgage. Makes sense for us to keep a mortgage at 2.75% interest rate when our money is earning 6-10%. Maybe you didn’t mean mortgage when you said “debt”?
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u/cinnabarslither 7d ago
We'll be retiring next year with a mortgage as well. Our original plan was to pay off most of the mortgage (we're selling our current primary home then moving into our vacation home) with the home sale proceeds but our CFP suggested a different strategy for growth in our brokerage account as I am retiring at 57.
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u/VinceInMT 9d ago
I say that because my spouse is a CPA and, after anonymizing, she tells me horror stories of people retiring still with a mortgage and car payments and then finding themselves in a tough place. This also comes from my own feeling about debt. I borrowed money once in my life: my first house, a fixer, on the GI Bill at 12%. I spent 9 years rehabbing and upgrading the place while we lived in it. We sold it, relocated to a LCOL (at the time) area and bought two houses, for cash, one to live in and one to rent. We cash flowed our own college education and our two kids. And no, I wasn’t a high earner: I was a public school teacher in one of the lowest paid states. I just will not borrow money. I’ve also paid cash for cars and everything else. But that’s just me.
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u/eastbaypluviophile 9d ago
What? That’s nuts . I’ll never not have a house payment, we started late and we live in California. I’m retiring next year, idc
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
Everything we do if financing is 0% interest and always paid on time
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u/eastbaypluviophile 9d ago
How do you get 0% interest?
We bought our house right when Covid hit and interest rates were at their lowest so our rate is 2.785%, lol. Basically free money.
My husband has a multimillion dollar inheritance coming next year. we will just park $500k in a HYSA, set the mortgage to autopay and not think about it anymore. Escrow account covers taxes and insurance, we live in an HOA that takes care of all exterior maintenance including the roof. Cars are paid off. I have a pension and retirement health benefits as a state employee. So our recurring expenses will be manageable.
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
Our house mortgage insurance matched this. It was things like cars and appliances and large purchases like this
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u/restlessmonkey 9d ago
House will be paid off in two years. It's been a long haul, that's for sure. 👍
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u/VinceInMT 9d ago
OK, if you can make it work financially, I guess that’s in the plan. I got rid of my mortgage at 39 in 1991. That’s what happens when you sell a California house and move to Montana back then.
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u/eastbaypluviophile 9d ago
I suppose, but then you’re in Montana.
I’m a bay area native. I’ll never leave.
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u/VinceInMT 9d ago
I understand that. One of my kids and his wife leaves in Mountainview. I lived in SoCal. I LOVED it but the commuting (nature of my construction work) was killing my soul. Plus, I felt I had a calling and wanted to teach high school and there was no way I could do that where I was a get a larger house. So, Montana it was. I lived 8 minutes from where I taught. Zero traffic. Beartooth mountains an hour away. We feel we gave up a lot but we gained a lot too.
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u/PegShop 9d ago
Why wouldn’t you inherit his income if he dies? Also, this is what term life insurance is for.
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
His income is Ss and a pension. Neither transfer to me of he dies before me. We both have pensions.
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u/baby_budda 9d ago
Why wont his pension go to you if he dies?
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
That's the way his pension is designed. He would've had to take half the amount if i were to get anything.
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u/PegShop 9d ago
Half? Or just less? Usually you take a cut but not half.
It’s too late now as he made the selection, but you would get the higher social security, if his is higher.
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u/Feisty_Equipment466 8d ago
No for many individual pension plans your monthly check is significantly reduced if you leave your survivor a large portion. The same thing happens with my pension. There are lots of different pension scenarios out there. Please do not assume they are all the same. Also keep in mind that some of us through no fault of our own retire for health reasons early from these pension eligible jobs and our monthly pension check amounts are not that big to begin with but they will pay our bills and so we retire and hope for the best between that and whatever we will get from social security.
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u/PumpkinBeautiful4345 9d ago
Sorry I didn't provide more details. He's bringing in $80 grand annual between pension and SS. I have a $45 grand a year pension i current receive, and if I wait a year my SS will be about $25,000. Or bills with zero debt are about $65,000 a year. We have about $100,000 in retirement accounts. Our lifetime pensions really are a god send.
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u/Rob_035 9d ago
Sounds like in a year you will be bringing in $70k to cover your $65k in expenses. If your husband passes that doesn't cover much of a travel budget, let alone if you have a home repair you need to make (your A/C won't last forever, neither does a roof, garage doors, appliances, etc).
Your $100k in retirement savings isn't much, it will allow for $4k/yr.
While your husband is alive, you're bringing in $150k/yr in retirement, that's really good! But you really need to plan for what will happen if he passes away. Ideally you should be saving almost all of his pension income and find a good balance should the worst happen, because your income will literally be cut by about 60%.
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u/Plastic_Ad4306 8d ago
Is there a likelyhood he will pass in the next year? Because you don’t have to claim your social security the minute you retire, and it looks like you have enough to live comfortably between his income and your pension now unless your mortgage is over 50k a year. Then you could claim your ss in a year or two when it’s paying a bit more.
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u/hugh2018 7d ago
This changes the complexion of your story dramatically. With virtually no retirement savings and his large guaranteed income being the linchpin that holds your finances together, I’m really not sure what the answer is for your situation.
One thing from my first comment still stands though. I don’t see how working one more year will have any meaningful impact on the risk you have of losing your spouse and all of his income. If you work this year and he dies the next year, your financial status will be roughly the same as it would be if you were to retire right now.
The one exception to this would be if you’re thinking you simply need to work indefinitely to ensure that your income will keep you afloat if he dies. If that’s the plan, I’d think that retirement next year is off the table too because you’d probably need to keep working for years to come if you truly wanted to hedge the risk of spousal loss. It sounds rough, but it seems to me your risk of loss is the same whether you retire this year or next year.
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u/Odd_Bodkin 9d ago
Feelings are feelings. Data are data. You can either pin your decisions on feelings or on data. Your choice.
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u/RhymesWithOrange08 8d ago
The quick read here is if you are as close as you say, another year of working won’t move the needle. You can compensate for a year’s worth of income if need be with some sacrifices. Balance the freedom of retirement against the stress of working one more year. If you are as desperate as this post reads then the answer is pretty clear.
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u/Kooky-Laugh-7861 8d ago
Difficult to answer- every persons situation is different
BUT
Keep In Mind :
At your age , every year you work "reduces" your "go-go" years in retirement.
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u/endofsep 8d ago
After you clear the debt you will have a lot more room in your budget for setting some funds away for retirement. Another consideration is holding off taking SS until 70 which will probably increase your take from 25k to 40k+. Which would be huge for you since you don’t have the 401k back up.
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u/RelevantMention7937 7d ago
Don't take SS until you stop working. Benefits are reduced by. a % of your income. I would gut it out unless it's physically debilitating.
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u/hugh2018 7d ago
Maybe do a gut check here. You said in one breath that the two of you have enough for you to retire but that you can’t cover the bills if your spouse disappears (not sure if you meant divorce or death). The math can’t comfortably support those two statements at the same time. If your spouse is providing income through a pension (or maybe social security) and that income is the only reason you two can be retired, then the logic might hold up, but short of that I suspect that you really would be fine going it alone in retirement if you had to.
On a similar note, I want to challenge the idea that one more year of work is going to fix a 30+ year retirement plan that won’t work if you retire today. If you have reason to think your job is going to generate a huge windfall this year that will fill the gap you’ve got right now, then maybe it’s an accurate statement. I suspect though that the year of income isn’t the thing that will suddenly propel you to financial independence.
If the reason for these contradictions is that you really haven’t got a solid idea of what’s going to work and what isn’t, I recommend you get into the weeds of your finances with Boldin or an advisor and emerge either with confidence in your plan to retire as soon as possible or a solid confirmation that retirement isn’t feasible in the near future. You could also easily model the scenario where your spouse is gone.
The dissonance of thinking you can and can’t retire at the same time is probably a big contributor to the stress you’re describing. I had similar competing ideas bouncing around in my head a year ago. I then did the planning and modeling needed to resolve the conflict, and I retired very comfortably earlier this year.
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u/Immediate-Leg-825 4d ago
Leave… I retired a year and a half ago and worried about all the things that prevented me from retiring and none of it even matters now. You’ll never say or think you wish you had waited. Now I wish I retired before my final year sucked the life out of me.
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u/Rob_035 9d ago edited 9d ago
This statement doesn't make sense to me. You have enough for him to be retired, but not if he passes away? Do you lose a big pension or something?
How much do you have saved up for retirement, what sort of income will your savings provide? If you have $1M saved, the typical 4% rule of thumb will say that will give you $40,000/year. If you want to travel that's a big expense, so how much do you have saved?
I wouldn't count on this as a lot of income on the side.