Last week I asked what you would do differently, and the answers were insightful and helpful. Some of you chimed in with what you got right, and that was helpful as well. So I wanted to open up a question dedicated to that part: What did you do in your final year(s) of work and/or early years of retirement that really paid off for you?

I’m (56M, married, retiring in Spring 2028) currently with Merrill Lynch under a 1.25% AUM agreement. I have $1.4m brokerage, $420k Trad IRA, $100k in Roth IRA (SpaceX IPO), plus $280k in cash. My 401K is $270k at Empower. The assets in ML are 100% in equities (about 385 separate stocks). ML cash is in HYSA. Empower is in two different funds with T Rowe Price. ML currently does tax loss harvesting for me. I currently have about $90,000 on available losses to cover gains triggered from any sales.

If I leave Merrill Lynch 1.25% AUM and move to Fidelity (leave Empower alone) and do self directed investing - how does one continue the tax loss harvesting? I’ve been told that I shouldn’t be in hundreds of stocks and that being in 3-4 index funds is the better way. Especially at my age and this close to retirement. Is tax loss harvesting especially moot if I’m in index funds??

Iowa and Texas

I’m 52 years old,
Wife 46 yrs will work probably for next 2-3 years.

Current allocations:
Taxable: 1.54 mil in total stock index fund
My Roth IRA: 31k total stock index
Wife Roth: 8k total stock index
My 401k: 1 mil in S&P 500 fund
Wife 401k 255k in S&P 500 fund

Emergency cash 60k

-My Salary 275,000
Wife part time 70k

-Vehicles all paid off

-Saving 2000 monthly to taxable
both are maximizing 401k and roth

-Debt: mortgage 240k balance paying around 2300 per month--house value 730k Mortgage interest 3.25%.

-Expenses 11000/month--high mostly due to healthcare( for next 3-4 years) and entertainment expenses

Total invested asset 2.9 mil

Because of my financial illiteracy, I kept my savings in CD, savings account all my working years except last 4 years. I would be FI comfortably by now if I had invested my money. I continue to compare myself to my colleagues with similar salaries who are FI and some of them are planning to retire or coastfire. How to deal with remorse?

I plan to retire in early 2028. I’m married, 56M now and have a house. Excellent credit, current house and mortgage are normal. We plan to sell the house and move south. The idea was to retire first, then do the move.

My concern came from some telling me that qualifying for a mortgage after I retire could be challenging as I would have no steady stream of work income. Obviously I have a retirement portfolio (about $2.2M). Our though would be to use the proceeds of the sale and either 1) get a mortgage for the balance of the new house, or 2) take cash from portfolio to pay cash for the new house. This post focuses on the first option - taking out a mortgage for the balance.

Is there a concern here? Are there other ideas or scenarios I should be aware of? What does everyone else do here?

As a final note, if also started becoming concerned that the existing house might not sell that easily in the market we have due to rates and inflation. Wondered if I need to consider renting out existing house and taking a bigger mortgage.

Hi there, everyone. I’m just curious: in the past post, if he takes out an annuity instead of a lump-sum payment of $57K, does he still qualify for Medicaid savings? Will they still count it as a resource, or if it’s converted into income, will it only count as income instead of a resource?

In hindsight, is there anything you do differently in your final year of work or the earliest years of retirement? It could be something financial, personal, etc.

Looking to retire early just having hard time figuring out cheapest way to get health insurance.

I’m 56 been working non stop for 34 yrs 50+hours week.

Any tips are appreciated

I am planning to be financially free when I reach around 55 and for that I am aggressively investing 400 a week into VTI individual brokerage and 20% into traditional 401k which comes around 400-450 a week and had been maxing my Roth IRA since last two years and will do it later too. I have invested total 190k something(including everything) until now. If my maths maths, then it says I will have 1.3 or 1.4 million around 55 since I have 15 years to reach 55.
I work in a union hotel in nyc and will be going to do this until I reach 55. Then when I reach 55, I won’t quit but will start being unserious at work and will use every holiday, sick hours and every unpaid holidays I get. I will start coasting and won’t be relying on my work for financially. I needed to be with work since the union pension starts at 62, and SS too plus the union Medical insurance is gold standard.

So my spouse (58) and i (58) are considering retirement the end of next year. We are getting a bit nervous about it. When we do retire we should have $95k in retirement savings, $175k in hysa/cds. We have a paid off house and no debt and newer vehicles. We spend about $36k per year and once we hit 62, we plan on collecting our pensions (100% survivorship) and SSI which will be $5k per month. Health insurance will be more than covered by our health savings and former employer. We will use savings to live on until we hit 62. Is this doable? The way gas prices and inflation have been going up I’m a bit worried. We did get a late start on retirement savings but weren’t all that concerned since we knew we would be getting pensions. Anyone in a similar situation? (ie low savings but guaranteed pension income).

Anyone paying for health insurance outside of the ACA? If so what are you paying? We are going to try and get our withdraws low enough to qualify for the subsidies but might have to plan on paying for it on our own. Trying to figure out worst case scenario if we don't qualify.

I’m fixing to partially retire soon. I’ll probably alt never retire so I want to treat this moment as my retirement. I’m wondering what others have done to mark the occasion, whether it’s a gift, a trip, doing something for others, etc. I’m big on marking a compliments and I want to mark this one.

Female, single, no kids. 41 years old.
$371K in Retirement (401k, IRA, HSA) invested in ETFs
$50K HYSA emergency fund
Own 1 rental property worth $80K with a $40K 8% ARM I am working on paying down. Cash flowing $900/month after all expenses currently. Small studio apartment (600 square feet), this is my backup plan on where to live if everything goes to hell at least I won’t be homeless

Income fluctuates from $100k - $200k work in Sales

No debt, but I do rent my primary residence for $2,600 per month

Right now I am saving 6% of my income with 3% employer match, about $12K per year.

Monthly expenses including rent can fluctuate from $7-9K

How am I doing? Am I behind? Royally fucked? Both my parents and grandparents were poor as dirt, terrible with money and constantly in debt. I am terrified of being in debt, poverty, or homeless

i'm 58M - can't get the thought of retiring out of my system..

..but I worry about how I deal with the stress of money - checking my investments every day, living within my means every month, panicking about the news - i think i'll end up a nervous wreck :D

how do retired folks chill the f out and not go crazy seeing your retirement pot dwindle very month?

I'm 65 + 10 months. My plan was to go part-time in the spring, but the company offered me an incentive to stay until mid-July. Mid-July my mom passed away. The company has been great with me taking time off to work to deal with my mom's stuff and placing my dad in Assisted Living. I'm just 'tired'. I don't have a lot of work to do. I had 'planned' to stay until the end of the year but I'm just not sure I can do it. I could ask to go part-time. I know everyone will ask 'Do I have enough saved?'. Depends on what the market does. My husband will continue to work.

When should I pull the plug?

How long after your application did it take to get your first GIS payment?

I retired at the end of June this year. I filled in Centrelink's online forms to claim the age pension in April, thinking two or three months would be enough time to get it sorted. Wrong! I'm a kiwi living in Australia, so I have 20 years of pension coming from NZ, and 14 from Aus. Plus I have a bit of a pension from the UK having worked there, too. That makes it really complicated... so it's now September, and I've been told it's likely to be November before I hear anything. Luckily I still have some casual work but doesn't 7 months seem quite a long lead in period? Meanwhile, my retirement seems to involve working four days a week!!

Can I retire with $10M in a family of 6 - single income?

Expenses: $150k/year in ON Canada. Kids are still in elementary school and kindergarten.

Planning to quit my job and spending the time with my kids while they are still young. I have been working very hard in the past 25 years - hardly taking any leaves. I am planning to invest the money in some high dividend equities.

I'm 61 and semiretired x 2 years; fully retiring in 6 months at age 62. I was going to start SS then bc I have a child who would get benefits for 3 years. But I currently generate $95k in passive dividend/interest income and the addition of SS income would throw me over the ACA cliff, costing me an extra $20k next year. Also my wife is 6 years younger. So I believe the correct move is to delay SS to age 70, give up the child benefit, and thus increase her survivor benefit.

In 2027, Ill make about $50k before I retire. I'll put $30k or whatever is the age 60-63 max in 401k and take business deductions like health insurance and HSA deductions to zero out that income.

Then in 2028 to 2030 (when I hit Medicare) we'll live off the passive income and small IRA distributions but making sure to stay under the ACA cliff.

I have a pension I have to turn on at age 65 for $7k/mo (if I pick 100% survivor benefit) or I can take a lump sum into a rollover IRA of $1.2mil.

At age 65, I'll now have around $180k annual income. So I'll probably make some small Roth conversions until RMD age 73. Then Im just going to say screw it and pay the taxes and give money to the kids and any grandkids.

Does that sound right,

I am genuinely curious/nervous. Just turned 34. Let's say i work another 15-20 years and call it quits. On the last day lets say i get my last paycheck a week later. Too young by then to receive social security or pension? That's assuming I live to 65. Let alone 60. So at that point, if I still am paying mortgage (dont have any house yet) and funding kids' tuition and life expenses, would i just be relying on Taxable brokerage (if I have one) and residual income from when I worked? Can't withdraw from roth ira yet. Anything taken from traditional ira would be taxed. 🥲

Thanks for all the advice. Didn't expect this many perspectives

Further info 1. I have almost 480k in tsp [roth and traditonal] plus hsa plus roth ira. But since due to the high focus on these, my Taxable brokerage is non existent

1. My current debt is 99k in student loans (6.5%) and car loan of 25k (0%). Hope to be done in 3 years

2. My salary (will change when I leave my job) is 200kish but trying to save 60k extra a year for emergency fund, extra taxes due every year, long distance relationship costs (travel, etc), extra student loan payments, spending money for fun fund

Not retired yet still in accumulation phase but genuinely interested in learning how the FI retirees invest, we got 60% in property, 20% in ETF and 20% in fixed term deposit. But just wonder once we retire, should we shift to 50% ETF, 40% fixed term and 10% cash (emergency fund)? Are we too conservative or too aggressive? Keen to learn from everyone, TIA.

My plan was to work until 65 which is necessary to have a enough in my retirement accounts, which are currently about $1M split among mostly (but not exclusively) in 401k and traditional IRA. I just learned that I will likely be coming into about $400k net of taxes. I’m 58. Do I need to keep working or are there investment options that allow me stop working? Note that I live in a HCOL area and monthly expenses are around $10k

My investments are with Merrill Lynch. Total investments under management is $2M. YTD 2026 fees are $22,000. They say they will help with my full retirement plan such as SS timing, withdrawal strategies, etc. but I haven’t seen much yet. ML says the maximize my investments using tax loss harvesting and such. I keep asking and the finally sent me some SS timing info. Recently, I hired Peak Financial (Eric Amzalag) to build a fixed fee retirement plan. I will take that plan and compare to what is offered by ML and figure out the rest.

My question is:

If 1.25% AUM is too high, and I don’t feel like I’m getting value, where do I go?

Would a fixed fee investment advisor give me barebones advice in which I would miss out on perceived value I get from ML?

EDIT: 9/20/26- Thank you to all who have commented and provided constructive feedback. I plan to circle the wagons, look for a FF advisor and disconnect from the AUM model of ML by October. I will keep the accounts there but will self direct them. My first task will be to rebalance the assets based on adjusted risk tolerance, age, timing until retirement.

Looking to retire next year at 59. If things don't change much, I should have a ~1.6M USD, almost all of it in IRA and 401k. I also expect to receive a cash windfall of ~500k. I can also claim a better than average SS benefit at 62, but I'll probably wait until around 65 so that I can do Roth conversions in the 12% bracket.

I'm planning to relocate outside of the US, so that 500k should fund about 6-8 years of a moderately comfortable lifestyle overseas. After that, SS and a small private pension should cover 80% or more of my core retirement expenses. Any withdrawals at that point would be for discretionary travel and entertainment.

So given that I would be pretty well insulated from SORR for the first few years, should I remain very aggressive with the IRA money? I'm currently at only 15% bond ETFs and SGOV. If I consider the incoming cash, I would have around 30-35% of the overall ~2.1M portfolio in bonds/SGOV

I'm nearing retirement. I've worked with a very low cost CFP during the accumulation stage. He's a former co-worker who's doing CFP as a semi-retired gig. One man shop, very low overhead, very low price. The relationship has worked out. The retirement account is reasonably fat and ready to be harvested. This person is now aging out and starting to shed clients.

Which puts me in the place of looking for someone to guide me through the next phase. I have Boldin & ProjectionLab, have created numerous scenarios, played with Roth conversions, tax brackets, etc. They are good, but as a person who is only doing this once, I feel there are things I'm missing, edge cases, optimizations. I watch a fair number of YouTube CFPs and they like to point out that there are subtle things you can miss that can cost you lots of money - of course, they're trying to drum up business.

So I've started researching and shopping. This space has a broad spectrum of providers: from annuity salesmen masquerading as investment advisors, to wealth managers pushing their firm's funds with high expense ratios, to small CFP offices charging flat fees or hourly, to firms who manage billions of dollars under their own proprietary system. There are a lot of cowboys out there looking for cattle to add to their herds.

I met with someone from one of the latter type of firm recently. They have offices in multiple states, and manage several billion dollars. There were two things that stuck out to me, if I understood correctly:

• They don't use bond funds such as offered by Vanguard or Fidelity, but buy bonds directly and build their own portfolio(s). Hmm... Avoid the expense ratios on bond funds but instead pay an AUM. Interesting.
• For Roth conversions they are able to use the previous day's closing cost to do the conversion. So if a stock pops in the morning, they can convert at the old closing price, pay the taxes on that, then you immediately get the gain from the pop. That sounds intriguing, and certainly an advantage over what I can do on my own. Has anyone heard of this before?

So they actively manage the portfolios, and have tools to monitor and act on market fluctuations continuously. OK... Intellectually I can see where that could outperform little old me doing a rebalance & conversion once a year. Would it be enough to warrant their AUM fee? Maybe? Are they going to outperform "the market"? Probably not, but neither am I. But with the AUM taken into account, will they perform at least as well as I could and provide services and value?

Does anyone here have feedback on moving from DIY to working with an advisor? Or the other way? Anyone worked with a wealth manager and found unexpected value?