RETIREMENT

6 years, 11 months, and 1 week to go..........Don't know if I can stand it.

unless you have something you have been paying into, good luck! they say that i'll have to work til i'm 71 to claim ssi and if they don't fix it now it's gone 3 yrs later

so thats like another 19 yrs to go

dom60 wrote:

unless you have something you have been paying into

I have--no social security.

What about social insecurity?

Flak Monkey wrote:

What about social insecurity?

I have a defined retirement plan--able to retire after 20 years plus whatever is left over from SSA.

Nice! Congratulations and best of luck.

I still have a few years to go but may take longer since I'm looking at changing jobs after 20 years.

Enjoy your retirement and again, congratulations

Nice my brother! I am in about the same boat. 6yrs 7mo and I'll have 25 in the school system, but I'll only be 45. Pretty much with our State Retirement System I'm in, you don't grain much after 25 yrs of service, so I'll probably change jobs to either a personal business or try to get into either the cable or satellite companies here, pick up another 20 years in their retirement system and pull 2x plus what little SS I'll get, and still only be 65. ; )

I will get half of my high three years on my state retirement pension plus (in theory) around 60 to 80% of my social security. However, I do not count on the social security in my planning. My wife will get somewhere around 60% of her high three years and she is planning on retiring at 25 years (2013).

So, out of the roughly 56%, we have to cover all of our health insurance, life insurance, and federal/state income tax.

If possible, I do NOT plan on working another job after retirement. So, part of the planning is to find a cheaper state to live in---or---move to South America/Panama/other CHEAP retirement area. Being a good ol' southern boy, I can hook up a truck to my double-wide and pull it to where we decide to live out the rest of our lives. Currently, Texas or Flordia are the front runners for our retirement states, with Wyoming a distand third (no state income tax for any of these states).

Another thing in our favor is our debt structure--we owe less than 150% of a year's combined salary, thus making it easy to pay off the remaining debt we have, including our mobile home. Planning the budget, keeping in mind her pending retirement, will ease the shock of her lower income.

I read in an article the other day that if you put $250.00 per month away for 40 years, you will have an egg nest of over 7 digits. Unfortunately, there are very few folks that can do that while trying to raise a family, pay bills, and cover the essential expenses of living.

So you have to make up the time and money after the last kid leaves the house--roughly 10-20 years. Every little bit that you can put away helps.

Just in case you are wondering why this post, I'm using myself as an example for poor retirement planning. I was not able to save money due to divorce/child support/etc. and then try to catch up with everything.

i had almost 7 yrs worth of 401k with the construction company i worked for back in iowa and the got canned for bull puckie reasons. wound having to live off the 401k after the unemployment ran out. now with differant chnges back and forth with jobs and have'n a 9 and 8 yr old to raise the stash for old age is none and i turn 52 in 20 days

.....well maybe i can keep this wally world job to build up again other wise i might be one of them guys holding a sign on the corner

(DC)DEMONSLAYER wrote:

I read in an article the other day that if you put $250.00 per month away for 40 years, you will have an egg nest of over 7 digits. Unfortunately, there are very few folks that can do that while trying to raise a family, pay bills, and cover the essential expenses of living

Very true - not many of us that had to start from zero (and possibly more than once) could afford that. When I first got married we didn't go hungry, but saving $250 (or even $100) was just impossible for us.

Again, glad you are getting to retire at all - some of us may never have that luxury. Though I've never had my own business, this might be the time to get that going but it is one of the biggest risks - I wouldn't want to dump money into it that I could have used for retirement. Tough choice.

Spike wrote:

Again, glad you are getting to retire at all.

Still have a little less than 7 years to go............many things can happen in that time. That's the reason for retirement planning, any planning is better than none at all and the earlier, the better. My wife and I are fortunate that we will have more coming in than most folks but it still doesn't make it any easier to like.