Southern California?
My dream retirement job is to work as a pirate wench at Disneyland.
But I will have to give up on my fantasy of a Club 33 membership - the list is closed.
â@busdriver11 How old are your parents? Do they have income? I am going in the other direction. I have not worked for almost 9 years now, and I was commenting to my wife this morning how nice it is that we havenât spent all our money during that time! I am using market uptics to reduce my equity exposure right now. My goal is to get rid of 40 positions and keep 2 or 3 (or 4 or 5) ETFs to keep things simple. .3% is not an exorbitant fee, especially when the investments will most likely be very low cost Vanguard funds, but I just prefer to screw things up myselfâ
@NJres, they are 86 and 75, and in fairly good health. They could live a very long time, especially my mother. They have smallish pensions, social security, and they have to take RMDâs now. But they have an extremely inexpensive lifestyle. I doubt that they have to draw down anything at this point. They have never paid much attention to investing, and itâs probably too late now, they are too fearful to make decisions about investing. It is fortunate that they have lived like they were impoverished for all these years, which is why they have saved so much money. In fact, awhile ago, they realized that they were paying so little attention to their finances, that for many years they had been depositing checks into an account that they didnât even realize existed, they thought they were going into a checking account. Surprise, there was 40K that they didnât even know they had. Very smart people, but just not paying attention. They are doing better on that regard, now.
Money canât buy the feeling of debt-free. :-bd
Pirate wench? I hadnât thought about that. My dream retirement job is to keep doing what I am doing, maybe transitioning a bit more of the personnel management part of the work to others. And, it will be time for me to write another book at some point.
Alas, no Disney in my future. We are going to Northern California â my Canadian wife does not like it too warm.
âIâd bet that no debt feels absolutely great.â - I hope to let you know in 5 years when the mortgage is done. Or possibly sooner, if we decide to pay it off earlier.
âPirate wench? I hadnât thought about that.â
Well, Iâm gladâplease donât! The thought of a pirate wench with hairy legs and a 5 oâclock shadow is quite unappealing! 8-|
^Funny!
We have felt an enormous emotional boost upon being mortgage free! I highly recommend it! 
Popping in, Iâve been reading and reading and reading. Yâall are a chatty group.
Some of it I have no idea what it meansâŠrmd?
âRMDâ stands for âRequired Minimum Distributionâ.
If you have a traditional IRA, when you hit 70.5 the govât makes you start taking distributions from it, and there is a formula to calculate the minimum amount every year.
When you figure out how much youâd want per year for retirement how do you calculate for inflation to come up with future dollars?
http://financialmentor.com/calculator/best-retirement-calculator
Here is a nice calculator to help you. This was posted by dstark much earlier in the thread and I kept it bookmarked.
I am so bad with money that I shouldnât be taken seriously. But I donât understand how everyone plans down to penny when the future is so unknown. What happens when you calculate your future spending assuming 3% inflation but something happens and much bigger adjustment than 3% inflation is needed? Isnât having a ball park figure good enough?
@iglooo, a ballpark figure is all you can get, so it will have to do 
Some things track to inflation pretty well, eg SS, equities, and TIPS. Other things donât, eg MM, bonds.
My personal approach is to oversave. Most likely it will just be good news for my heirs. At worst, I will get by.
Iglooo, if you add in inflation, it just appears hopeless. I hate that calculator.
Owning real estate rentals we hope will help us keep up with inflation, as those rents should rise if there is inflation. Keeping some diversity in your investments helps too, so you can have some growth while sleeping well at nite.
I just ballpark it and make sure I wonât be living on alpo in my old age. We look like weâre over saving, which as we all know isnât really a thing. How do you say what age youâll die?
Itâs assuming I never make more money or save more. I know itâs annoying to read about but we recently finished saving the kids tuitionâŠthey went to private school their entire lives and we saved for their college forever. We also doubled our business in the past year. Now I have the strangest most unfamiliar issue of what to do now with the money. Weâre saving enough comfortably to retire, we have probably too much in cash since our dream of buying another house fizzled. The house didnât appraise high enough for the homeowner. Now we feel like we have no goal or idea what to do.
^ have you spoken with a financial adviser?
We have someone who manages most of our accounts, but we recently met with another adviser to get her take on things. It was good news - all of our saving is paying off and we can retire at 64 with the amount we want (which she felt was quite generous). That gives us about 6 more years to work by which time our kids should be settled and we will have the option of working a few more years or retiring.
Maybe you can retire earlier than projected, travel, help kids buy a place or help fund grandkids education? Help with kids weddings? Weâve helped fund Sâs sole 401k and given him a very low interest loan for him to buy inventory for his business.
We have always lived below our means, and donât worry when we havenât spent it all before the end of the year.
We have no plans on helping anybody, we hope that we will be on receiving side some day. But we are OK without. We gave them education, they do not have student loans, the rest is up to them!
It is scary enough to think about being poor on social security. We do not live below our means, still have to see how it will work living in 2 houses instead of 1 with expansive travel between them. And retiring from my best ever job does not feel like fun at all, it can actually depress me as I will loose my main entertainment. I loaded Sudoku on a pad already to play on a beach (hopefully not sooner than 2.5 years from now), but, frankly, I do not have any idea what else I will be doing. For god sake, I do not even clean my house and have no plans to start doing it at my old age. Cleaning people do it much better! I do not do much at home at all. I am over full retirement age already. Many people around me are planning to retire not earlier than 70, we do not see any reasons to retire earlier and we do not collect Social Security yet as it just will be much more taxes.