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We have a decent savings account building not great but decent.
Our current home will be paid off when I am 56 so we'll have approx 6 years to sock away even more using the current mortgage payment $$$.
Between my pension, deferred comp(government talk for 401k) and hubby's 401k we should be good for day-to-day expenses without a mortgage payment.
We are planning in the next year or so to go buy some land in Alabama, get it paid off then build a house with the proceeds from the sale of this one.
Sounds good to me. You are still young and retirement could be 15 years out for you. You have the ability to work and save quite a bit for your nest egg.
We started saving late and are paying for it by working 24/7 now. Our homes have been paid for for three years now and we collect a tiny bit of rent for one of them. We do not have a retirement income other than our savings that we are trying to build up until we can't breath any more. You sound solid to me, but I am not an expert. Like Ben Stein says "just keep saving." We are also looking at Alabama along the coast. Found a little town, Daphne that looks charming. We will build a little box to live in.
We have a decent savings account building not great but decent.
Our current home will be paid off when I am 56 so we'll have approx 6 years to sock away even more using the current mortgage payment $$$.
Between my pension, deferred comp(government talk for 401k) and hubby's 401k we should be good for day-to-day expenses without a mortgage payment.
We are planning in the next year or so to go buy some land in Alabama, get it paid off then build a house with the proceeds from the sale of this one.
We started planning for my retirement when we first realized that it was going to happen in a set year. About 14 years before my pension kicked in.
We began focusing our investments toward that goal, and shopping for an area to retire in. Our shopping continued for years, but did not really get frantic until after I had already retired.
I retired when I was 42. and we did not purchase our retirement property until I was 45.
But at least I have no mortgage, everything is paid off. The farm that we retired onto, our motorhome, our cars, our boats, and my goldwing.
My husband and I started planning our retirement when we got married 34 years ago, we stayed with jobs that didn't pay a great deal in wage but had a retirement plan and deferred saving account. It's now down to the wire we have less than a year to go, beginning to wonder if our savings (just over 400K) and our retirement income but we are dropping from dual income to a single retirement income. I've been reassured that we will do fine but cold feet is setting in and I don't want to retire when I'm so old that I can't enjoy it
When I turned 40 we set down to figure out what we needed vs what we had. Yikes! We had spent what we earned and had saved very little. So we hunkered down and began faithfully saving my paycheck, we both put the max in our 401K plans, and began developing a list of what we wanted out of a "retirement" area. We lived in the SF Bay area and knew we wouldn't stay there just because we could live better elsewhere with the cash we would get from the house.
We also had a lot of luck. We worked in hi-tech during the dot.com boom and didn't do anything to get us into trouble when the bust came. We had cashed out options and invested the proceeds. The last couple of years we worked we realized that we didn't really know "where" we wanted to land. This seems to be the biggest diliema (sp) for most retiree's planning on leaving their current place of residence. So we bought a house (cash) in Las Vegas and worked from there for the last year of work.
We then spent 5 years traveling around trying to figue out the where. We've landed in the Branson MO area and love it. It didn't fit the "low tax" criteria of our list, but it met all of the rest (sans Trader Joe's for me )
Your plan sounds good to me. I can tell you that it does cost more than we thought it would to be retired, but it doesn't cost us anywhere what it did in CA when we were working. Our biggest single expense is health insurance...and we just have major medical with a huge deductible.
I started seriously planning at age 45. Before that for my whole career, I casually contributed the max allowed to all the retirement vehicles available - 401k, IRAs, our pension - without giving it much thought, except adhering to a principal of living that meant saving for my old age as a matter of course.
Now, 2 years away from eligibility, my mortgage is paid off because I've been paying as much ahead as I could afford for years. I've calculated my annuity, counted all my savings, calculated how much my house is worth, made detailed lists of all the things that need to be done and costs to sell it. Calculated how much an anticipated move will cost and how to do it, including how much and the mechanics of doing a test live in my prospective new home. I've listed out the things I want to do when retired and how I'd like to structure my life. I've listed what is important to me in my living situation and as I grow older and possibly get debilitated. I've built projected detailed budgets out to 3 years beyond my retirement date to see how the money goes while I am still working, then the lowered retirement income and all the anticipated expenses. I use my current expenses as a broad basis and add and subtract the known differences. I've calculated the taxes and even a return based on my projected retirement income so I know what that burden is going to be.
So far, the numbers work with a healthy margin. Every few months, I get the spreadsheets out again and refine the numbers, sometimes finding errors to correct or change the assumptions according today's reality. And the numbers keep working so I am getting really confident that retirement will be bliss.
I've been planning for retirement since the day I started working. I've always saved money because I never felt social security was secure at all for a baby boomer. I decided if I wanted any kind of life after I retired I'd better be ready to finance it myself. When I got married my husband agreed and we've continued to save and invest our money. We've run the numbers many times and we think we'll be okay, but the cost of health care is unsettling. That is the one thing we think could destroy all of our careful planning and saving.
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Woke up at 40!
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