In Retirement

There is a slowing growing movement to offer annuities within 401k plans, mostly through target date funds. They purchase the annuity gradual starting around age 50 or so or in a lump sum.  401k Plan provisions determine other options. I think it’s a good and much needed option for the great majority of workers.
But my question is, how important to you is a regular income stream, at least to cover all basic living expenses. I know many HD folks like the flexibility of DIY withdrawals,

I DON’T HAVE MANY regrets in life. But there is one conversation with my mother that I wish I had never had. It was about moving her into an assisted living facility. She was in her 90s, and I thought it would be best for both of us.
My mother would receive better care, and I could take much-needed breaks. She could even keep her house and spend time there when I was with her.
It seemed like a middle-of-the-road approach to providing care.

Possibly a misuse of the term, in its strict financial sense. Anyhow…
For decades I’ve heard about the value or use of leverage. It’s most easily recognized in our homes, often bought with a small down payment and a big loan, so that even minor increases in home value in early years create impression of a big return on our actual expenditure.
Yet last year, when I took on several major home “repairs” (a loose term for work that included demolishing and rebuilding a decrepit garage),

Your 35 years of earnings is what determines you social security benefit, not the taxes paid. Here is why.
✔️ Your benefits are paid for life and perhaps to a survivor. Your benefits don’t stop when you have received all you paid in FICA taxes – roughly after collecting benefits for 6 years.
✔️ The SSA averages your highest 35-years of earnings and then adjusts them to reflect the growth in wages using the AWI – average wage index.

Credit to John Mauldin and Ed Yardeni:

The three-week war in Iran is now 3.5 months, and there is zero consensus among people that I pay attention to as to when it will end. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for weeks. As noted last week, Treasuries now come with an asterisk. China is building production capacity designed to permanently close the door on Western industry in thirty critical sectors. And the S&P 500 is up 17% in four weeks.

I’m planning my first course correction 2.5 years into retirement. I thought I was going to write about Roth conversions, bucket strategies, asset location, and so on. And I am. But it turns out that that’s not the point.
I came late to the HumbleDollar/Bogleheads way of thinking. I’ve been absorbing it all for about 4 years. Thanks to Jonathan, Adam Grossman and all here. I’ve learned a lot, put the advice together into what I think is a coherent plan,

I used AI as an editorial assistant to help organize and refine my thoughts; the underlying ideas and personal experiences remain my own.
Like a lot of engineers, I spent my career solving problems the same way: build a model, gather the data, run the simulations, optimize the result. So when retirement came into view, I did what came naturally. I built spreadsheets—and got back a mountain of output and almost no peace of mind.

Jonathan’s thought of the day is, If the stock market’s performance over the next five years was miserable, would you be? I thought it might be fun to kick this one around a bit. 
Though I am positioned just fine to survive five or even ten years of misery from the market, I still wouldn’t like it. I guess I’m just too used to seeing things go up. So while the nuts and bolts of our life would be fine,

WHEN I STARTED writing for HumbleDollar, Jonathan gave me some simple but important advice: “Don’t brag about your financial situation. You want readers to like you.” Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he named his financial site HumbleDollar.
I try to follow this advice not only regarding money, but in other aspects of my life. I know how fleeting things can be—especially when it comes to health. Life can change on a dime. It can humble you.

I WAS SCROLLING through social media recently and saw somebody dismiss retirement accounts as “paper wealth.” The argument was familiar: Your money is locked away and you’re waiting for permission to access it.

There’s a grain of truth here. Retirement accounts do come with rules. But much of the discussion online ignores how flexible these accounts actually are. More important, it ignores the enormous tax advantages.
Most people today will likely live well beyond age 59½.

My almost 47 year old daughter is getting divorced from her 49 year old retired military  husband. He wants her to drop the Survivor Benefit Plan which costs close to $400 monthly and he will get a 15 or 20 year term insurance policy for $500,000 for her benefit. She has been a stay- at- home mom so her career prospects are unclear.  My concern is she could end up at 62 or 67 without the insurance or survivor benefits. 

While working, there is something we call payday, it may happen once a month, more likely two or four times a month. Generally that means money is deposited into our bank account – a steady income stream we count on to pay a new set of bills. 
Then we retire and everything changes, no more payday. To me recreating that is the key to a less stressful retirement.  I can say that because I am fortunate to be able to do so and know the feeling of a retirement payday. 

RETIREMENT IS LIFE’S most expensive purchase. During our working years, we deprive our present selves of immediate pleasure by refusing to spend money for nicer cars, a bigger house or a vacation to boast about. Instead, we squirrel away those saved dollars with an eye toward keeping the future us fed, clothed and living indoors. 
At age 64, after decades of choosing to save and invest a large chunk of each paycheck, rather than spend it,

“Everyone” knows that Social Security was never intended as the sole source of retirement income or even the majority of income – but apparently not everyone knows it if you believe the rhetoric. 
Many people claim that the COLA in inadequate, even unfair, some rage that what they receive from Social Security is not what they were promised or what they paid for. 
Truth is that it is what was promised and we did not pay for our benefits,

I always thought waiting until 67 to take Social Security was the responsible choice, until life gave me a reason not to.
I retired early, but I’ll save that story for another time.
What mattered then was this, I’d earned enough credits to claim Social Security at 62. Under Jonathan’s guidance, the plan was simple, we wait until 67 and lock in a larger monthly check. It was sound advice, grounded in math and discipline. So I held onto it.