MARCH 31 MARKED the fifth anniversary of my retirement from fulltime work. Back then, I didn’t think I was retiring and I’m still not sure I really have retired. Instead, over the past five years, I’ve described myself as semi-retired. But a recent HumbleDollar article provided a better description of my situation: I’m in a “phased retirement.”
How have things gone, what have I learned and what would I have done differently?

WANT A HAPPIER, more fulfilling retirement? You work your entire life to get there, and you want to make the most of the time you’re given. But how? Here are my 10 rules for retirement:
1. Have a purpose and a plan, but be flexible. You might have devoted more than 70,000 hours to your career, so it wouldn’t be a big surprise if your work has become a huge part of your identity.

WHEN I RETIRED 10 years ago, I need to replace my biweekly paycheck. Because I was retiring early, and there would be no pension or Social Security for many years, my goal was to use savings to create a synthetic paycheck.
During my final few years of work, I prepared by channeling most of my paycheck into both taxable and tax-deferred accounts. My pay was much higher than what I needed for living expenses.

IF THERE WAS ANYONE who should have been emotionally unprepared to retire, it was me. In the years immediately before, I was at the top of my career. I’d been promoted to vice president. I had virtual total control over my job. I was recognized by nearly every employee because of my extensive employee benefits communications and the fact that I’d negotiated benefits for decades. I was among the few who routinely met with the company’s chairman.

I’VE FINALLY DECIDED when to claim my Social Security benefit. Along the way, I realized that calculating the ideal start date is easy—provided you can predict your retirement income needs (doable), your investment returns (hard), the inflation rate (hard), your future tax rate (hard), your date of death (hard) and what Congress will do in the future (impossible).
This particular financial journey began when I was preparing a recent blog post on the knotty issue of when to file.

JUST HOW ROUGH HAS 2022 been for retirees? Vanguard Target Retirement Income Fund (symbol: VTINX) is down nearly 6% so far this year. Barring a strong comeback, this could be among the lousiest years for this conservatively positioned mutual fund since its October 2003 inception.
The pandemic led to a rash of retirements. Soaring stock prices, booming real estate values and flexible work arrangements helped change the employment landscape. Many Americans finally called it quits in recent months.

LOTS OF RESEARCH has been done on the best way to generate retirement income. It’s one of the most popular topics on HumbleDollar. I think this popularity is driven by two things: its obvious importance—and the fact that there’s no one right answer.
By contrast, figuring out how much we need to save for retirement is relatively easy. It isn’t hard to pick a future retirement date, or at least a range of years during which we’ll likely retire,

I’M IN THE HABIT of checking my investments every day. Since I consolidated them into one Fidelity Investments’ account, it’s easy to see the impact of market movements on everything I own. I don’t depend on my investments for income, but it still shakes me up when I see big drops, especially several days in a row.

If market gyrations affect me, what must they do to retirees who depend heavily on their investments for income?

SEEING YOUR IRA or 401(k) decline precipitously is bad enough. Locking in those losses is far worse. The good news: I’ve perused various Facebook retirement groups since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and have seen few signs of panic.

For instance, here’s some good advice from a prudent retiree: “Stay the course, but in the future make sure you have enough in a cash reserve for at least one year of planned withdrawals or RMDs,” meaning those pesky required minimum distributions that must be taken each year by those of us age 72 and older.

VIEW ANY NUMBER of YouTube videos on retirement planning, and you’ll find advice on how much you need to save each month, how to invest, how much to accumulate and how to generate retirement income. The same is true for the experts who write blogs.
All this information relates to the retiree. Rarely—actually never—have I seen a discussion about survivor benefits. Even the 4% rule uses an assumed 30-year retirement period, apparently ignoring the possibility that retirement income needs to last over two lifetimes that may extend beyond 30 years,

WHAT IF WE MADE IT easier to delay Social Security, so more retirees ended up with a larger monthly check?
Last year, I wrote about a study from Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research (CRR) that detailed the value in claiming Social Security later. A new CRR paper examines the topic further.
The paper describes a survey of those nearing retirement. The goal: to gauge interest in using a 401(k) “bridge” to generate income while folks delayed claiming Social Security.

THE SOCIAL SECURITY claiming decision is one of the most complex—and contentious—choices that retirees have to make.
I was reminded of that in December, while at a Christmas party. Two former colleagues were discussing their Social Security decision. Both are male, single, childless, retired engineers. Each has a traditional pension, a paid-off home and significant retirement savings. Ted is age 77. Fred is 66.
Ted took his Social Security at 62. His reason was longevity or,

THE DRUMBEAT OF “retirement crisis” is much too loud. While 54% of retirees believe there’s a national retirement crisis, just 4% describe their own retirement situation as a crisis. And whereas 90% of recent retirees are able to spend freely, within reason, or can cover their needs and also engage in some discretionary spending, only 10% say that they’re on a strict budget.
Concern about running out of money is regularly exaggerated by inflated estimates of life expectancy.

READER COMMENTS on one of my blog posts prompted me to dig deeper into my thinking about asset allocation. A trip to the HumbleDollar archive led me to a Charley Ellis article where he emphasized that readers should incorporate Social Security, pensions and annuity payments into any analysis of their asset allocation and portfolio risk.
A guaranteed stream of income is clearly valuable. I knew this, but I had missed the obvious conclusion—that the net present value (NPV) of these income streams should be considered part of a portfolio.

THERE’S AN EXPERIENCE I keep thinking about. I was visiting Italy pre-pandemic, enjoying a great dinner with a lovely family. I was introduced to two nonnas—grandmothers in Italian—who were in their 80s. Although fine physically, they were both suffering from dementia.
That got me thinking about how that could have happened. I’ve read plenty of research on how retiring to a simple lifestyle, and not being challenged mentally, accelerates cognitive decline. I wondered whether that’s what happened to the two nonnas.