I’m sure your financial picture is not as simple as 2 W2s 
! If I were in your shoes, I would look into professional help, especially with taxes. For us, and many others here, an advisor is not needed to pick a fund or two or three out of the ten choices offered in the 401(k).
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FA fee arrangements are not right for everybody. I can say though that there are situations where there is a neutral advisor involved, ensuring regular meetings/discussions and taking pressure off the decision making for more financially savvy spouse.
For those here still working and trying to plan for retirement, I highly encourage taking a retirement planning classes (or a few of them over time). It provides opportunity to get your ducks in a row on your various assets paperwork etc. And you’ll learn a lot. If the class fee includes a free private consultation, do it… but feel no obligation to sign up with the advisor. (They know they’ll have only a low yield of customers.).
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I have one too on myself. In many ways I don’t mind it. At this point if I outlast my better half my kids will have a nice chunk of change as an inheritance. Even if I spent all my money and died with exactly $0 the kids would get a welcomed boost.
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I support this.
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And that life insurance payout boost would be tax free, a nice thing.
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For the last week nearly every single post has been about investments and/or strategies for investments or topics related to investments (e.g.,real estate prices increasing and how that affects retirement costs). That’s it. My eyes are glazing over. Not everyone wants to discuss this all the time, which is fine and why I suggested making investments a separate topic.
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Me 3!
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Same
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@momofboiler1 - some of us would like to have a separate thread to discuss more general retirement concerns (NOT investments or strategies for investment) - would the mods have an issue with this?
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True. My mom passed in August and her policy paid for the funeral costs and had some leftover. Her estate was simple for sure except getting my brother to cough up the money for half the house when he decided to take it for his daughter. All of a sudden things slowed down. I should have had the funds before the most recent rate cut. Some was going into a CD. Because I am an Accountant I figured out it was costing me $7 a day by not having the funds. Plus since we were waiting on those funds to pass an amount directly to our kids it was upsetting me. Really it was the lack of communication that was the most irritating.
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Go for it! I’d recommend putting in the title and first post that it isn’t to discuss investments.
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Cool! Did he overestimate his abilities?
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Good idea to start another thread about investment topics. As far as eyes glazing over, mine start glazing when there are continuous posts about Medicare, long term care, government benefits and repetitive and detailed posts that I’ve read on here time and time again. 
I know the Medicare and long term care information will be important to me soon, but I just can’t wade through them.
Point being, there’s something boring to everyone on this forum.
And something interesting, otherwise we wouldn’t keep coming back.
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I agree and though I will probably spend more time on the Life in Retirement thread that @sabaray just started, I’ll keep checking back here so I don’t miss any non-boring conversations.
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You are correct, @BunsenBurner, that my situation is not a typical W2 employee. I worked on the direct investment side for a very wealthy family in NY for a few years and they used the top tax guys at Deloitte to advise both the firm and the family. I could see how much of a difference really good tax people could make compared to run of the mill people. So, when I went out on my own, the first thing I did was to ask around for the best tax person in Boston who was focused on entrepreneurs. Several people suggested the same guy and he and his firm have been very helpful to me over the years.
I’m sure most of the services and FA can offer other than investment management are not of value to everyone, but I listed some of them as one or more might (or might not) be useful to you. No judgment either way.
@jym626, no overconfidence evident.
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Good points.
To summarize the answer to the thread title, I finally got to the point that I no longer worried that we might outlive our money or might ever have to take out a mortgage on the house or something (if we continue to live in it in our later years). There really wasn’t an exact target number. It just became a comfort level.
Like others, I will always enjoy finding deals and bargains, but there are things and conveniences and comforts I now choose to pay for.
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@busdriver11 and @jym626, I had a target number a decade ago. It seemed pretty high so at one level I kind of felt I must be doing something wrong but it was also a bit hard to calculate given that the vast bulk of my assets were in qualified plans. I could only assess whether I would have enough if I did a financial plan – based upon a certain set of return and other assumptions, would I run out of money. Then I would want to do a Monte Carlo analysis that looked at other possible variants of those assumptions.
Since I never stopped working, the number today would be lower.
I have gotten a lot of useful information and insight from the other members of this thread about both financial and other issues.
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We did one of those Monte Carlo things a while back. It said we were fine. Our finances are clearly not as complex as yours ,but apparently for our lifestyle, we are fine. My DH had a target number many years ago and I felt it wasn’t enough. So he’d hit that target and I’d up the target. He’d hit that one and I’d up it again. We did this dance several times until I finally felt comfortable with where we are. Hard to know a number, but when it feels like enough is enough, we (generalities “we”) are there.
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To me, if certain topics make one ‘glaze over’ - just skip over. Yes at times a particular topic does get a lot of input because people are fine-tuning things – be it their understanding of the topic, how they handled, caveats, etc. If I didn’t need the info and I could introduce something else on the thread, I did. Sometimes the thread is dormant.
At year end and start of the year, people are thinking about things they need to finish up and things they need to start doing. Many people avoid some things, and sometimes need ‘baby steps’. Some things get ‘thrust on them’ like having to gather their tax info for doing their 2024 taxes - and then also thinking how to structure things better in 2025 to not overpay on taxes.
This particular thread is so good, and maybe just we can move on out of financial discussion for a bit.
Or maybe better to keep this long running thread series (3 parts!) for general discussion and start a new one for those interested in Boglehead-like detailed investment discussions.
At this point our situation is set. I just follow this thread for curiosity and to perhaps shard some of what we’ve learned with the newer readers that might be joining in (but of course maybe there are no new lurkers).
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