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Deciding When to Retire

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I’m right there trying to decide. I’m so tired of the corporate bullshit, but even more so, I’m just tired of the daily stupidity I deal with. Clients and associates alike.

A year and a few months to 65. Add an additional 2 years to that for SS full retirement. Wife is already retired.
 
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buckeyebri said:
I’m right there trying to decide. I’m so tired of the corporate bullshit, but even more so, I’m just tired of the daily stupidity I deal with. Clients and associates alike.

A year and a few months to 65. Add an additional 2 years to that for SS full retirement. Wife is already retired.
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I had planned on waiting until 65, but now I am thinking take SS at 62 and give myself an 3 extra years of the healthiest retirement time I will have. I feel like I'm at the point where enjoying the time I have left is more important to me than padding my retirement account. I'd pull the plug earlier, but I doubt my wife would be okay with it and I want buy-in from her.
 
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Do it as just as soon as the numbers make sense. We only get so many years on this planet. Life is about doing what matters to you, not sitting in an office dealing with dumb corporate bullshit.

I’ve seen too many clients retire and die just a few years later. Or get sick and can’t enjoy the years they have left. Or their spouse needs to be taken care of.

If you have 20 years left, do you really want to spend 5-10-15% of that time doing something that you don’t enjoy?
 
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Retirement and when to start SS are much different questions

SS involves 2 questions.. 1) what will your non-SS income be because it doesn't take much (even with Trump's new tax rules) that you could end up paying a bunch of SS rev back in taxes... every year you delay past SS qualifying age gives you an 8% bump in SS revenue.. 2) what are your chances of living till 84.. that's about the breakeven age when it becomes much more beneficial to wait till you're 70 to start w SS payments.. you win the 'bet' after turning 84

Medicare is a a different issue.. for most, it will be the best medical plan you may have ever had..

Can't give advice about retirement cuz I 'm pretty sure I will retire and die the same day.. but I am a believer that you need to stay busy post retirement.. else you shut it down and the grim reaper comes earlier.. doesn't mean staying at your job.. means staying busy.. even volunteer work
 
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sparcboxbuck said:
Wife just retired on 5/1 and I can go any time I want. Both 55. I really don't know why I'm sticking around other than to pay cash for some remodeling work... but that is just because I want to put a nice bow on this new place so that when I check out those upgrades are paid in cash and I can walk away owing nothing to anyone.
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Marcus Hall style .....
 
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zbuck said:
Marcus Hall style .....
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Yeah, kinda. LOL. Only difference would be that when I go out, it would be more like going out in front of the home team. It won't be anywhere near as hostile... on either side.

I actually kinda like my job. I like the people I work with. I don't work very hard. I'm in AI engineering and have been in a 'hot' job role for my entire career. Really no complaints other than I just don't want to be tied to the desk anymore. I don't want to sound like a recruiting X post, but I do recognize that I'm pretty blessed to be in the position I'm in.
 
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sparcboxbuck said:
Yeah, kinda. LOL. Only difference would be that when I go out, it would be more like going out in front of the home team. It won't be anywhere near as hostile... on either side.

I actually kinda like my job. I like the people I work with. I don't work very hard. I'm in AI engineering and have been in a 'hot' job role for my entire career. Really no complaints other than I just don't want to be tied to the desk anymore. I don't want to sound like a recruiting X post, but I do recognize that I'm pretty blessed to be in the position I'm in.
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sooo one last git --commit with a nice little surprise they find in 5 years after you've moved to a non extradition country?
 
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CincyInterloper said:
Deciding when to retire is a tough decision. For those of you who have retired, what was the tipping point? Do you wish you had kept working longer or that you had retired earlier?
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My wife and I were both career Colorado state employees. Our jobs were both nonpartisan but involved working in a political environment, and my job, in particular, involved quite a lot of night and weekend work and sleep interrupting, weight gain promoting, short temper inducing stress.

We don't have kids, have been pretty conservative with money and savings excluding travel, and had started our careers long enough ago that we were lucky enough to be locked into a generous (not NY, California, or Illinois crazy generous and overly gameable, but generous) defined benefit pension plan (which has since been modified several times to become progressively less generous for more recently hired state employees so that virtually all new hires choose a defined contribution plan instead) that let us retire without early retirement penalties at 55 with any number of years or service or after 50 with thirty or more years or service.

A big factor for us was our mortgage, which we'd been rapidly paying down with significant extra principal payments and paid off in full in September of 2024. My wife retired just before that on July 1, 2024, at 57, and I called it November 1, 2025, at 56. I'm an attorney, and post-COVID, public sector attorney compensation generally rose a lot faster than it had previously, and I got promoted in 2021, so, to capture much of what easily were the best raises of my career in my pension benefit (which is based on the average of the three highest years of salary with some guardrails to avoid "bumping" abuses so I got super-lucky with the post-COVID public attorney market reset), I worked one more year than I'd initially planned to. Even with that, I actually left quite a bit of pension money on the table by not working another additional year, but the extra money wouldn't have changed how we live and I'd simply hit the wall. Ultimately, I felt as though the combination of being surrounded by the toxicity of politics and the workload over the last few years was starting to age me 3-4 years for every 1 that I worked.

I think I retired at the right time in that I both improved my pension considerably by working one more year and also allowed my wife to adjust to retirement for over a year before I joined her. We also had a lot of turnover in my former office, and especially on my team, in the last few years, and working the extra year allowed me to keep training up and supporting younger attorneys and plan the transition for the woman (who I worked with for 26 years) who took over my position. While one more year would have both allowed me to do more of that and improved my pension quite a bit more, as I said, I'd hit the wall, especially when being made aware on a daily basis of the difference in my retired wife's stress level and mine. I just couldn't stand it anymore, maybe most of all the daily effort of maintaining a positive face and doing my best not to be the burnt out old guy that makes the younger employees question what they're doing with their careers. I never wanted to be that guy.

While I haven't yet figured out what retirement is going to look like for the medium and long term, without the stress I have slowly lost 10 or so pounds total while adding muscle and getting measurably stronger through better sleep, more exercise, and more intentional eating habits while reading more books, trying to learn a foreign language, and slowly feeling my brain, which I truly think was being impaired by my work, get a bit sharper. I likely will do some sort of work again down the road, as I am struggling a bit with feeling "unproductive", but I think it's going to be a reinvent myself kind of self-employment or side gig thing rather than anything to do with law or government. Year one of retirement is mainly about getting my body, mind, and house (literally in terms of decluttering and some repairs ) in order, and reconnecting with people who I like and have frankly neglected for quite some time. We've also got some pretty great travel plans. Sometime late this year or early next year, I think I'll be ready to get more intentional about what the long term looks like in terms of "productive" living.

As for your own decision, leaving the more personal questions, like "how much of my identity, if any, is related to my work/how much might I miss it?" "will I be bored without it?" etc ... aside, make sure you, and your wife/partner if you have one, know and are on the same page about what your retirement wants/needs/expectations are and how much they'll cost and know how much income you'll have to pay for them. Insurance generally, and especially health insurance, are a bitch, at least pre-Medicare, unless you have some sort of subsidy for it.

If a defined contribution retirement account is a big part of your plan, make sure you KNOW how much you can take on a monthly basis without putting it at risk of running out. My in-laws actually saved enough to retire on, but my MIL, who we didn't know didn't know about things like the 4% rule, grossly overspent their retirement accounts until they ran out (spent on what I don't really know), and they are now in a position they don't like to be in and didn't need to be in even after my wife and I bailed them out of the credit card debt that she'd been too embarrassed to tell us she'd taken on once she drained the retirement accounts (we had to do it as by the time she got desperate enough to tell us about it the balances were snowballing at a horrifying rate). If you don't have a fixed fee-only financial planner or a tight financial plan, I strongly suggest using one and making one before making the retirement leap.
 
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Just speaking to Social Security, it's really different for every individual. There isn't any "blanket" answer. In my case, I spent my entire life beating the hell out of myself in physically demanding jobs: Industrial construction, machine building design and fabrication etc.... The old body was really starting to show it. I looked at what my benefit amount would be at 67 vs starting to collect at 62 1/2. It really wasn't a huge amount. Considering my health issues, I don't really myself living into my 80s or beyond. I figured that I would actually get a total amount of money by retiring at 62 1/2 instead of waiting until 67 to collect the higher amount. I have continued to work part time at my old employer although in a different capacity. I just have to be careful not to exceed the yearly allowed income to avoid being penalized prior to full retirement age. The net result has been that my monthly income is HIGHER between S.S. and employment than it was working full time yet I'm working much less, and my employer pretty much let's me set my own schedule and I'm about 50/50 work from home. (the company is also located literally right around the corner from where I live so there's no commute. I've walked to work on occasion) It's worked out great for me, but your mileage may vary.
 
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Jagdaddy said:
If you don't have a fixed fee-only financial planner or a tight financial plan, I strongly suggest using one and making one before making the retirement leap.
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Yeah, can't overestimate how important good planning is. We worked with our (fee based) planner for nearly 20-years developing our portfolio. While accumulating is important, where you accumulate your assets is equally important. Retirement / tax advantaged accounts are great, but if you have any intentions of going early, you better have plans for post-tax retirement accounts ('hero' accounts) to get you over the bridge until you can start to access that other stuff without penalty.
 
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