How Many of you Retired at 62, took SS, and invested it? (accidents, payment)
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I would never retire before I was eligible for Medicare. I am sure many do, but I don't know anyone that wants to retire that badly LOL.
I retired at 61 ..I used cobra and then an aca plan when cobra ran out.. the aca silver plan sucked and was expensive catastrophic insurance but it served its purpose.
It had thousands in out of pocket and no subsidy.
I actually semi retired from full time and went to 3 to 4 days a week at 59
I see the logic of taking SS at 62. The caveat a lot of us face is possibly having to work until 65 for affordable healthcare.
With good tax planning , like living off roths and cash as well as the zero capital gains bracket , you can get a pretty good size subsidy.
But it really does take a lot of planning
Many dont know , but an advantage to permanent life policy’s is they all have had minimum interest rate floors that were like 4% on the older policies .
You can over fund them up to what is called mec limits which is where they go from an insurance policy to an endowment.
That over funded money can have no expenses or fees taken out of it .
You could have gotten 4% on it for decades now , borrowed it out at retirement , it is not taxed and never pay it back .
It just gets subtracted off the death benefit bringing it down to the value you bought in the first place.
So getting a big chunk of your insurance paid pre Medicare can take some planning depending on what you have
Last edited by mathjak107; 12-26-2021 at 03:53 AM..
Ha Ha! that reminded me of a very stressful job I held long ago for 14 years.
there were only 4 of us supporting too many users across too many relational databases. Users who had too many db rights that they used to do too many bad things. It was so stressful that we started calling our boss Art to say that we were too sick to come in, repeatedly. We had an amazing amount of stomach flu, migraine headaches, troublesome backs, hernias... we ate bad eggs and got sick, Art! Finally, one brave soul called Art and said, I'm not coming into today, Art, I'm dead. More of us died/were resurrected on alternating days... Miraculously we were finally healed of our ailments when we got additional co-workers... and some of those bad users found their db rights severely curtailed...
I'm going to be retiring around 62, and no, I don't plan to invest my SS. Although one thing life has taught me, especially in the last 2 years, is never say never.... things can change in a heartbeat (or the loss of a heartbeat).
Lower fixed income is almost always better to file at 62. Higher fixed income adds more flexibility and variables, which tend to favor delaying. Medicaid or ACA or any low income benefits are not even remotely a consideration for us. Based on your description my SS will be 2-3 times what yours is. Delaying, while the same percentage is a much larger absolute number. I already have many, many times what my SS would be, invested in “markets”. I don’t want anymore under that risk umbrella. If you think that the “markets” are less risk than SS, then you are already at a severe disadvantage.
None of this means this isn’t the best choice for you. The differences in absolute dollars between filing early and delaying in gross NW is miniscule for me. The larger tax advantaged income later in life is worth way more to me than the paltry returns an added $20k/yr invested would be. For you, it sounds like it is a large amount of your savings. All a matter of perspective.
You lost me (which isn't hard to do). Yes, I went over it all with MathJak on a couple different threads. I'm not going to rehash it again. If people want to give an example of what their strategy is and explain it in a way that is understandable I am sure some people would find it helpful.
If I delayed ss at 62 we would have layed out over 320k over 8 years until age 70 in ss we were not getting .
At age 70 we would have 320k more compounding going forward with early ss …that can be 1.3 million over 25 years assuming someone makes it to 95 ,at just a 6% return .
Matching that with the higher ss payment and even looking at only 85% of it being taxed is hard to match .
It would pretty much take until 90-95 to equal that same amount from the bigger ss payments .
At the end of the day assuming one did live that long it’s a wash .
However odds are pretty good that under more realistic life expectancy the early ss and not spending the extra money down would likely leave the bigger balance
I retired at 61 ..I used cobra and then an aca plan when cobra ran out.. the aca silver plan sucked and was expensive catastrophic insurance but it served its purpose.
It had thousands in out of pocket and no subsidy.
I actually semi retired from full time and went to 3 to 4 days a week at 59
Who knows what government healthcare will look like by the time I retire. I thought ACA was already gutted.
Because people promised to gut it as a political platform?
ACA is still there, the subsidies are still there, the cost sharing is still there, the number of insurers participating has been increasing since 2017 to now 97% of participants have at least two insurers to choose from, average premiums have gone down for four straight years, and they just broke the record with 13.6 million signed up for individual coverage for 2022.
I don't think "gutted" would be an accurate description.
Also regarding ACA, I'll also go out on a limb on predict the political will to end it is no longer there. I'm sure some politicians will still go through the motions of repealing/gutting it as a talking point but I think even if repubs retake the house then win the presidency in 2024 ACA will not be in as much danger as it was when John McCain gave the thumbs down to Trump in 2017.
What are your feelings about taking SS at 62 and investing it in the S&P?
Reasons we chose to do this. Sidenote: Being low income enough, we obtain small perks you all cannot
✓ Fear SS will be cut in 2032.So much in-fighting= less realistic they will solve problem earlier vs later
✓ Allowed us to re-finance for a better rate. I do not have an amount for the other property
✓ Save $5 a mo. savings on PG&E bill since income, on paper, is under 35k. We have Solar but I luv this!!
✓ Save $600 a yr./$50 a mo. SS tax brackets entails earned income too. 7k more generous tax bracket
✓ Easier to spend down for Medicaid LTC. 57 days a yr of LTC coverage via retiree health plan, is minuscule
✓ Look poor on paper
✓ Luv watching growth in my retirement acct surpass delayed SS. S&P Rocks!!
✓ Forgot to consider SS COLA raises. My bad.
✓ More $ saved to pay for my own LTC. Postponing or eliminating Medicaid enrollment if LTC is needed
✓ Easier Access to In-Home Paid help via Medicaid with less to spend down. Again RMD's are much less, for some years at least, than a large SS check foisted upon us at age 70 standing as a barrier to these things.
Any other perks anyone can think of to investing SS at 62 vs delaying?
I doubt anyone planned it and followed through with it indefinitely.
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Miraculously we were finally healed of our ailments when we got additional co-workers... and some of those bad users found their db rights severely curtailed...
