I enjoyed reading your story. My story is a bit different, but I share the struggle of letting go of the apparent "meaningfulness" of working out in the business world. I also worked for 37 years before calling it quits. Slowly over time I find myself settling into doing things that I just want to do: play my guitar, play golf, home maintenance projects, and I even relish lovingly edging and cutting my carefully manicured lawn. Although I have not yet been willing to just sit down and read a book, I think I would feel so idle doing that. Today I spent the better part of the morning cleaning out the 7000 useless emails in my inbox but preserved all of my unopened HumbleDollar emails. I took the time to read a few stories and will continue to do that. Maybe I'll contribute someday as well. Best of luck with your transition.
Why I didn't wait ... entirely. First, it's a very individual decision as to when to take Social Security. The pundits mostly fall on the side of wait till 70 unless you "really need" the income now. With comments like "it's your insurance for when you're old" and "take the 8% annuity that SS provides". For me, I started taking at 66. My FRA was 66 and 2 months, but there is no magical boundary when you're not working as far a reduction of benefits. I had planned to wait until my FRA and not 70 anyway but COVID nudged me into retirement in 2020. I spent a year or two prior to that running spreadsheets on the breakeven age of taking versus waiting using a number of scenarios. I will say it's a difficult analysis with taxes, inflation, investment returns etc. I used 5% cost of money for my calculations not 2% that most online calculators use by default, because I intend to stay conservatively invested in the market. I came to the conclusion that if I waited till 70 instead of taking at my FRA I would catch up and start to get more at about 83 assuming I lived that long. For me that was likely as I am in good health. But life has no guarantees. I survived stomach cancer in 2015 and that definitely changed my outlook on waiting for things as I drift into my "golden" years.
One of my pet peeves with retirement calculators is that they assume you will be just as active at 85 as you want to be the day you retire. I would rather front load my retirement to do things while I have better health and vitality and I'll scale back to sitting around playing cards when I lose my energy. By then a much larger portion of my expenses will be medical and not travel and such.
I was fortunate enough to have saved enough money that I could have squeaked by without SS but it would have been tight. In the end I decided that I would rather take and spend the 4 years of SS (that my heirs can't keep if I die) than my nest egg. So time will tell whether I made a good decision or not but so far I got really lucky that during 2021 while we've lived mostly on SS my invested nest egg had huge returns. At least this year the gamble paid off.
Comments
I enjoyed reading your story. My story is a bit different, but I share the struggle of letting go of the apparent "meaningfulness" of working out in the business world. I also worked for 37 years before calling it quits. Slowly over time I find myself settling into doing things that I just want to do: play my guitar, play golf, home maintenance projects, and I even relish lovingly edging and cutting my carefully manicured lawn. Although I have not yet been willing to just sit down and read a book, I think I would feel so idle doing that. Today I spent the better part of the morning cleaning out the 7000 useless emails in my inbox but preserved all of my unopened HumbleDollar emails. I took the time to read a few stories and will continue to do that. Maybe I'll contribute someday as well. Best of luck with your transition.
Post: Farewell Paycheck
Link to comment from July 27, 2022
Why I didn't wait ... entirely. First, it's a very individual decision as to when to take Social Security. The pundits mostly fall on the side of wait till 70 unless you "really need" the income now. With comments like "it's your insurance for when you're old" and "take the 8% annuity that SS provides". For me, I started taking at 66. My FRA was 66 and 2 months, but there is no magical boundary when you're not working as far a reduction of benefits. I had planned to wait until my FRA and not 70 anyway but COVID nudged me into retirement in 2020. I spent a year or two prior to that running spreadsheets on the breakeven age of taking versus waiting using a number of scenarios. I will say it's a difficult analysis with taxes, inflation, investment returns etc. I used 5% cost of money for my calculations not 2% that most online calculators use by default, because I intend to stay conservatively invested in the market. I came to the conclusion that if I waited till 70 instead of taking at my FRA I would catch up and start to get more at about 83 assuming I lived that long. For me that was likely as I am in good health. But life has no guarantees. I survived stomach cancer in 2015 and that definitely changed my outlook on waiting for things as I drift into my "golden" years. One of my pet peeves with retirement calculators is that they assume you will be just as active at 85 as you want to be the day you retire. I would rather front load my retirement to do things while I have better health and vitality and I'll scale back to sitting around playing cards when I lose my energy. By then a much larger portion of my expenses will be medical and not travel and such. I was fortunate enough to have saved enough money that I could have squeaked by without SS but it would have been tight. In the end I decided that I would rather take and spend the 4 years of SS (that my heirs can't keep if I die) than my nest egg. So time will tell whether I made a good decision or not but so far I got really lucky that during 2021 while we've lived mostly on SS my invested nest egg had huge returns. At least this year the gamble paid off.
Post: Why I Won’t Wait
Link to comment from August 27, 2021