Well, after a lot of stress (not least of which is living in a half-empty, echo-ey, staged house, and having to keep your house showroom-ready at all times), and only having my head explode three or four times, we have finally sold the house. Closing is in three weeks (knock on wood), and next Tuesday we move into a 1000 sq ft 2BR apartment!
And, starting this week, my company has agreed to let me drop to a four day work week, so I now have Fridays off permanently! So I guess I’m 20% of the way to being retired.
@notrichenough - Congratulations! We LOVE small scale living! The only challenges we have had are when we have company that our bedroom situation doesn’t accommodate. A single person visiting is fine. A married couple visiting is fine. However, grandmother and grandson visiting at the same time does not work for us. I had a thread on this with lots of good suggestions about air mattresses, etc, that, unfortunately, don’t really work for us. However, other than that rare situation, we are completely thrilled to be downsized and to have so much less to worry about!
DH and I have owned a small business for almost 20 years and have just decided that in 2-3 years we will be closing the doors. Houses are paid for, college is paid for, we are pretty set to downsize our income. It can stay open if one of the employees chooses to buy into it but so far none have pursued that. Otherwise, we will sell the assets and walk away into jobs that enable vacations. It is a massive effort to take a rare weeks vacation and all of the work is waiting for us when we return. We want long weekends and longer vacations, to help with our far flung kids then they start families and to not be the face of a business anymore. My mind has been spinning since we decided this - stupid stuff like “Will I ever have to reorder envelopes?” and checking on the depreciations schedules to maximize our deductions in the next few years. It is a fun distraction and I’ll start making lists soonish.
Congrats, @notrichenough! Unloading an illiquid asset is quite a deal. We were lucky with our previous houses. The old house went into contract in 4 days, and House1 got an offer in less than two weeks (could have been much sooner if we had put it on the market in the spring). Hope we don’t have to sell House2 soon… Although Mr. is about to start his retirement project, so we shall see.
We are using the second bedroom as an office for both of us. So unless someone is willing to sleep on a couch, there will be no overnight guests. :grimace: I suppose we could get an air mattress.
We discussed bringing a twin mattress from one of the bedrooms, but the only place it could go would be leaned up against a wall, and then move stuff around to accommodate it when needed… nah.
That (no overnight guests) honestly makes it easier, though we do like visitors and have had a ton since moving to the beach. Lots of couples coming for three-day weekends. I just like my ds to stay with us when he comes to visit. That whole “under the same roof” thing. But, we only have the one, and he is still single.
Our second bedroom is multi-purpose for us - office, exercising, and music playing. We went with a sleeper sofa. I should have pushed harder for the Murphy Bed.
We also have a sleeper sofa in our 2nd BR (we live in a 2BR apt). That br functions not only as a guest room, but also office, library, and TV/streaming viewing (that’s where our 2nd tv is). It functions well as a guest room when a single person or couple visit - it’s getting tight when S, DIL and GD visit, but we could take the guest room and give them the larger MBR.
Congrats - lots of good news. @BunsenBurner, what your husband’s retirement project?
As of today i am within 1 year of my first likely retirement date. Plan is to retire sometime between next July 31st and February of 2022. We are looking harder at what we want to do, where we want to live, etc. It seems like we sort of lived for the kids (paying for school, etc.) for so long it’s hard to think about just us. Of course we always consider the kids, but we really like the idea of going someplace “fun” for at least a couple of years. What I don’t want to do is stay where we are, just because we can’t make a decision. (Although it’s a reasonable possibility that we will opt to stay where we are).
Maybe this is sort of redundant, since a couple of people are talking about it on the retirement $$$ only thread, but what do people think about paying off the mortgage in relation to retiring? We want to pay ours off, and are possibly 1 check away. I know it will mean we have less in the bank, but it will also help us sleep well at night. We also feel like it will give us a better idea what our true expenses in retirement will be, which we’ve been trying to calculate from various angles.
We paid it off and it felt wonderful. We don’t talk about it among others, because we don’t want anyone to be jealous. It made sense because we could and we had nothing else planned that we felt would make us feel better. It was a goal to try to pay it and all the kids’ ed expenses before H retired & we happily were able to do both.
I think it depends on how important liquidity is to you vs. cash flow. If you would feel better by paying it off, then pay it off. If your money is just sitting in the bank earning 0.1% interest, you are better off paying it off IMO.
We paid it off twice. Second was to put an large addition onto our home instead of moving. Then I sent the monthly payment to retirement savings (taxable and non-taxable mutual funds).
I could certainly pay it off (been an early retiree for awhile) but I make more on my investments and sleep fine with a mortgage. To me, it’s a personal decision. I consider my mortgage cheap money.
The last years of a mortgage are mostly principal. Nonetheless we will likely pay ours off a little early. We have plenty of savings. and we prefer the idea of lowering cashflow needs now that DH is retired. Years ago we had a consultation with a financial advisor explaining that financially speaking it often makes sense to not pay of the mortgage… but his highest net worth customers had opted to be debt free anyway.
The highest net worth people may have a mortgage whose amount is trivial compared to their total net worth, so that any potential investment return arbitrage opportunity is small relative to their total net worth. Hence they may just pay it off in order not to have to remember making a monthly payment.
It’s easy enough to set up automatic payment of a fixed amount every month to the mortgage company, so that any disputes can be cleared up by your bank rather than you yourself. We just had a similar situation with my son’s landlord, and it wasn’t a matter of my claiming to have mailed it versus the landlord saying they hadn’t received it; I sent a screenshot of the bank’s bill pay to the landlord and gave them a number to report the non-receipt to.
Some feel that having a mortgage is a form of inflation protection, which I guess it is, but there is a psychological benefit to having a paid off mortgage. I really dislike mortgage companies.