I've always had aspirations of retiring in my 40's as there's so much else I want to do in life that work prohibits, both from a time and monetary standpoint.
Then I got married, bought a house and had a child and while that doesn't seem realistic now, retiring in my early - mid 50's is the goal.
We do the traditional saving methods - Roth IRAs, Roth 401 K's, 403-B, and mix in some life insurance we can cash out
Barring something crazy, we'll likely get a modest amount when our parents pass away, and have a decent SS paycheck when it comes time for that
My wife will also have a pension, but accessing that anytime before 55 is a 3 % / year reduction in the amount (also needs to put 25 years in teaching, or reach 55)
We do ok financially - nothing over the top, but not going homeless either
Could probably have some nicer things, but prefer to save $ right now (but not at the expense of vacations, sporting events, Broadway shows, etc.) - more in the realm of pre-owned cars, not going out to eat 4 times a week and having a nice but not over the top wardrobe (nothing wrong w/nice things, just using this as an example)
For those of you that have been able to retire at that age, or at/near 60, what was your methodology?
Was it saving, investing, real estate, inheritance, making big $ for a lot of years, invented or patented something, owned/sold a business or some sort of combination?
Sounds like you're doing most of the things you need to. I also couldn't wait to retire, as I liked work, but I love my hobbies and since retiring 4 years ago at 57, I've really indulged them. While the pandemic put the kibosh on our travel plans for awhile, I've been having a blast playing disc golf 4-5 days a week (about 3-4 hours for travel and to play typically), including many tournaments on the weekends (those are all day affairs), plus I've picked regular golf back up a bit and started playing weekly soccer again on Sunday mornings last year, plus there's softball in the spring/summer. In addition, my wife and I do about one day trip per week within a 1 hour drive (or train if we go into the City), plus we eat out several nights a week, including going out with friends at least once a week. We're hoping to start traveling more extensively this year: Europe trip in the works and we go to Vero Beach 2x a year to see my dad and my sister who live there, as my dad can't really travel anymore.
We also started playing poker weekly when the pandemic hit, as our group of 8, which has been playing monthly since the late 1980s, had more free time and one of the guys in the group took a rudimentary poker game in the Steam gaming environment and programmed the shit out of it, creating a game that's way better than any other on-line games, as it's free and it automatically deals any of our ~20 games with betting, folding, shuffling and pot-splitting (high low games) all automated, so it's even significantly faster than our in-person game. And we're on Zoom the whole time so the connection/banter is still there. Now we play in-person monthly and on-line monthly - and I often go to the casino to play on the off weeks.
And then there's my weather hobby (obsession? lol) as people see here (and in about 4 other places) and my music hobby, DJ-ing several events per year, still, plus going to see bigger shows several times a year, plus local acts periodically and, of course, my RU sports fanaticism with a group of 12 for football and a group of 4 for hoops - and this board and TOS - and other social media sites like FB. I also do some volunteering as I'm on the RU Chem/Biochem Eng'g Dept's Industrial Advisory Board, plus I do some info sessions and student mentoring and my wife and I do some local volunteer activities in town.
Financially, the most important thing anyone can do, IMO (apart from never, ever, ever carrying credit card debt, which is the worst thing anyone can do), is to save as much as you can from day one of working which we both did - it's especially important to max out with any 401K/IRA contributions (not just for a company match but the max amount one can, legally or at least the most one can afford). That wasn't hard for my wife and I, as we got used to living off of my tiny stipend from RU while in grad school and her fairly low income at the time - and then when I started working at Merck for a lot more $$ ($55K to start in 1989), we put most of that away from the beginning.
We ate out a lot and traveled some, still, but were thrifty in other areas - for example, we almost never bought new cars (just once) and drove them until they died, we furnished our house mostly from death, divorce and estate/garage sales (my wife got some amazing stuff at 10-20% of cost at estate sales), and we never spent much at all on clothes or jewelry (I probably never spent more than $200/year on clothes, since I went to work in jeans and an oxford shirt, generally). Over decades, I'm sure that saved us a ton.
We invested our 401K money pretty aggressively until we hit about 50, when we started going more conservative (some bonds/bond funds), as our goal shifted towards preservation. It also helped a lot to work for a company with a defined benefit pension plan, which I was originally going to take as a monthly annuity, but in early 2022, I could see inflation was coming and might get bad, so since I had been sitting on the pension, I decided to take the lump sum right then and there before it went down by quite a bit with rising interest rates (lump sum amounts changed quarterly and I would've lost over $300K from the lump sum if I had waited another month to execute the lump sum) and we rolled it over with our financial advisor into a mixture of mostly bonds and some stocks, since at 59 preservation was absolutely our goal over growth (which comes with more risk and we didn't need more $$, we just didn't want to lose what we had if there was a big market drop). Even invested conservatively, we've made far more in 2 years than the zero we would've made on the pension annuity, which had no COLA associated with it.
I was also fortunate to have my best friend as my boss my last 5 years (I kind of got him the job, so he was always grateful), meaning I did very well at a senior director level with regard to bonuses/raises, but more importantly, he knew I was thinking about retiring in my late 50s, so when he came to me in early 2019 asking if I would want to retire with a very nice separation package (1.5 years of salary) I jumped at it and retired in early 2020 - and then they hired me back as a consultant at a 25% higher rate for ~20 hours a week right at the start of the pandemic, so I did that for my first 18 months of retirement, but have been 100% done with work for 2.5 years now, despite still getting offers to do consulting. I don't miss it at all apart from the people - and I still get to see a bunch of the folks I worked with as I'm close by, plus they still invite me to the holiday and summer BBQ parties (which I still DJ). The one thing I still miss, though, is working with groups of talented people to solve really difficult technical/project problems, especially when we were all under the gun and working like maniacs to figure things out.
At this point, we're living off of monthly disbursements from our various IRA funds at a level just a bit above our after tax income when I retired and despite having to withdraw from that our overall funds have increased in value above that cost. We also had enough liquidity to put about $70K into the house over the past 2 years for some much needed renovations (complete remodels of the 2 upstairs bathrooms and a complete remodel of our family room with very nice new furniture for a change, plus repainting of every room in the house) and we're planning on a complete redo of the backyard (~$70K to take out the old deck, put in a new large stone patio and do a bunch of landscaping and other stuff). Probably won't take our SS until 70 on the advice of our FA, who basically said that if you don't need it, wait to take it as you'll get more, overall, by the time you're 80 and beyond - sure there's some risk of not getting to 80, but from our perspective, SS is a bonus and just in case our estimates of things are off and we end up having a much tighter situation, we'll appreciate having more $$ overall by waiting (we'd get an extra $400K by the age of 92 if we wait until we're 70 to take it vs. 62).
Our other major asset is our house, which is worth close to $1MM now (crazy, as we bought it for $250K in 1993) and is 100% paid off. In addition, as per my other post, one other benefit of working for a pharma company is that our retirement health care is essentially the same as it was as an employee and while it's more than it was as an employee, it's still reasonably cheap ($800/month for my wife and I) vs. the open market and we'll have that until I'm 65 and have to go into the Medicare pool. Given that our overall assets are in pretty good shape, we've started donating more to groups that mean a lot to us, including RU, where my old boss and I - he also got his PhD in chem eng'g from RU - established a $50K endowed scholarship 4 years ago. And we started gifting our son this year so can get at least some of his inheritance at a lower tax rate (and when he can really use it), as the pre-tax IRAs he inherits (much of our portfolio) will need to be cashed out over 10 years, which will likely mean some higher taxes on that - it's still way better than getting nothing though, lol. My wife and I can gift him up to $36K/year tax-free - we did around $20K this year to start.
One more thing. It'll probably come as no surprise, but there's no way we're leaving NJ, especially for anywhere warmer - the furthest away I'd ever consider is NWNJ to get more snow, lol.
