I don’t know if we would like living in an adult community. Our lives are so good now.
We live in a beautiful wildlife preserve-like setting in a major metropolitan area and it makes us very happy. The family we bought it from added a four room in-law suite (2BR, two bathrooms, huge sitting room and small kitchen) overlooking the river. When the parents got older, the youngest daughter raised her family in the main house while the parents lived in the in-law suite.
I don’t think we would give up the beautifully renovated kitchen/LR for quite a while, but we could easily see our daughter move in with a young family. When she was 22 and getting reading to finish her MSN, she said, "Dad, I’ll make a deal with you. After about a year or so, you will help me buy a two family house. You will live upstairs and I’ll live downstairs. When my kids are little, you and Mom can help take care of the kids. When you get older, I’ll take are of you. She does now own a two-family house about 25 minutes from here, but I think this house would be a lot nicer (some architecture magazine is going to do a story on it). Would be very symbiotic as we have a very good school system but the town is one of the more expensive towns in an expensive metropolitan area.
We are not in walking distance of anything but nature. I’m hoping / expecting that autonomous cars will be up and running by the time I can’t/shouldn’t drive.
I found this article interesting, as well as the state by state numbers.
Honestly, the states that take the highest amount of money to take home $100K/year from salary also probably means higher other costs to living there. Some a whole lot more than others.
The reason most private companies got rid of traditional defined benefit pension plans is because of increased life expectancy.
In the old days, if you got a pension at 65, the company expected you to live until 66-70-ish. When life expectancy started to increase, it became too much of a financial burden.
Some companies switched to a cash balance plan (in addition to a 401(k). Traditional pensions are economically unfeasible.
Yes. Although most companies don’t offer pensions to new employees, they still may have to deal with those who are grandfathered in existing pensions. And even then, they often have multiple pension plans as they changed the benefit factors and evolved over time.
I thought this was an appropriate article for this thread. Many here may not necessarily ‘count’ on SS check, but it does come in on cash flow in. As a senior with both DH and I obtaining SS checks, it helps us not have that be replaced by cash flow from our nest egg funds/investments.
There are some interesting permutations if you are married and there is variance in ages/life expectancy and SSS benefits because of how survivor benefits work. This link was posted upthread that I found very useful. https://opensocialsecurity.com/
“Again, there’s no single correct age for all retirees to file, as it will depend on your situation”. Well the full picture of each situation includes the TBD death date. And the possible need for extra money for travel during the “go go” early years of retirement (though you can make the argument that inflation and health needed will mean more money needed later). Lots of factors. The online calculators can help you compare some “what if” scenarios.
That article is just too simplistic and poorly written. Married? Do you need the money to live on at 62? 64?
The claiming math is mostly neutral for a single individual with average health and life expectancy.
Why is maximizing income the goal? (yeah, I get that its simple for the readers of USA Today, but the article is from the Motley Fool and they should know the difference between PV and FV). Shouldn’t it be to maximize wealth? Or, at least note that the latter drives much different claiming strategies.
*Average health means taking 4+ prescriptions for multiple chronic ailments.
sry. didn’t mean to criticize you/your post, but yes, its a complex issue, and most of the article is just ignores folks who are married 10+ years. For marrieds, the numbers alone can be significantly different as all SS tables are based solely on single life expectancy.
For many people, taking SS too much before full retirement age does ‘hurt’ a little – as the article said “claiming prior to age 64”, only 6.5% of retiree would maximize their lifetime income by filing at ages 62 or 63. But, if the nest egg is big enough, and health care costs are not a factor pre-medicare…and especially if there are health issues and you want some go-go years before health gets too bad to do the things you want to do in retirement.
We know we will maximize our money by taking SS when we did, because we are maximizing our nest egg and the ‘guaranteed’ return of 8% if waiting until age 70 is not more than what our investments will make – based on historical data with our ROI.
Next time I see my sister I will ask her when she started drawing SS. Her DH is 16 years older than she is, but I believe she was able to have a larger check with drawing off of her own earnings. She stopped working at age 63 or 64, had a small teacher retirement pension (she didn’t work enough years for full pension), was able to purchase her health insurance at a reasonable cost for just herself. I know she consulted her financial advisor on this.
It’s not apples to apples if one is guaranteed and the other is not. But in addition, isn’t the social security return actually 8% real return (since the payment also goes up in line with inflation each year) whereas most investment accounts state a nominal return?
But you also are foregoing the ‘opportunity cost’ of the years of the stream of payments. And you are spending down your nest egg by the amount your stream of payments would be - and that cash has investment value as well.
Yes, a guarantee is a comfort, but if you have your other investments with your risk comfort level, you have returns that will give you the return of the guarantee and have the income stream. So later, at the threshold of where your money coming in when you waited until 70 to collect versus the returns you received from the income stream at an earlier age – and you also are risking that you will outlive the numbers into your 90’s. The time value of money comes into play in addition to opportunity costs. That 57% rate is almost 50-50 in my view.
As pointed out in this thread, difference between PV (present value) and FV (future value) come into play.
Everyone can be happy with whatever decision they make, as what makes sense in everyone’s individual situation.
It’s difficult to determine what’s the best age to take social security since no one has a crystal ball. The closest was the payback strategy. But once they eliminated the payback strategy and file and suspend, most “strategies” to game the system and maximize benefits were eliminated.
The payback strategy was a loophole the SS administration finally eliminated after too many people learned about it at client seminars sponsored by financial services companies.
That is the most important factor by far and we don’t know. Estimating when to take SS is a bit of a charade. There’s nothing scientific about it. The biggest data point is missing. It is not a numbers game as many programs pretend to be. It is what I am comfortable with in the old age game. It is how important it is to you to have a larger steady income in the old age.
The other issue not discussed here is if and how much future SS benefits may be cut, or taxed. We can blithely talk about holding off filing to get this big increased benefit, but there are no guarantees that the program won’t change. I went ahead and filed at 64. DH will file at 70.