I do too and it facinates me that they are happy to spend the next 30 years every day on the golf course. I can’t see how that would not be absolutely boring!
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Well, it will be what it will be. We’ll have to cut expenses I guess. I don’t think we really live all that high off the hog now. I think our biggest financial mistake was paying full fare for college when we should have made our child take merit aid or send her to a state school. We are very fortunate in a world-historical sense and it’s undignified to complain, but we should have recognized our true economic position 20 years ago and made decisions accordingly. We won’t starve or anything, we’ll be fine. But we won’t be living lavishly with second homes and travel, and I hope that we do not get expensive chronic conditions or dementia. Nothing we can do about that. Everyone has to cut their cloth to fit their coat.
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I’ve long felt that we have no worries heading into these later years. We have investments that will provide a good income most years. We also aren’t lavish spenders but I do like a nice car. We have a big trip planned this spring that I’m wishing we hadn’t committed to. It’s not rational but I’m concerned about the economy and I’m not sure about expensive travel.
I’m also concerned for my kids and their spouses employment. One gets VA disability and I’m concerned that will be taken away. If they need help I want to be able to do that.
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I don’t like to travel, but one day on a golf course would do me in. You know the saying, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
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We made the same choice as you did…and don’t regret it one bit…for two kids.
And like you, we aren’t going to starve or anything like that. And we made it to retirement able to do the things we want to do.
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I worry about my kids as well - both have good jobs but the downstream effect of what is happening is scary. I will hold on non-essential expensive purchases for a while until this settle or change completely just so I have spare to help my kids if necessary. I know they are nervous - I do feel for them because they were so happy to get good jobs and making self supporting salaries. They do save, so that is a little security.
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I am also more concerned for our kids than for us.
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I’m another one who is more worried about my kids (though there is a good chance they’ll get decent inheritance if we are fortunate enough to avoid huge nursing home expenses).
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There is just no way we will need the amount of income we needed when we had 4 people living in the house of which two were active kids that came with plenty of expenses. I mean we did have to feed them. 
We have been thinking and planning for retirement plenty. We will downsize and whether we end up with 2 condos to split time or a condo in San Diego we will not have a mortgage. Our property taxes will be cut in half. I don’t plan on having a car payment in retirement. We might even go down to one car. My DW is definitely a homebody and is content on spending most of her time at home. I am more active, but I think we could survive on one car in the right situation.
We won’t have commuting expenses. My commute is ~$10 per day round trip. I do plan on playing plenty of golf, but I hope to work a couple of days a week at a course and get free golf. DW won’t have health insurance costs in retirement so we will just have to deal with mine. We won’t be saving for retirement.
Sure we plan on traveling, but that increased expense will be offset by the other things listed.
Plus the nice thing is we spent many years pinching pennies so if we had to cut back on things we definitely could. You just do what you have to do to survive at times.
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It sounds like you’ll be fine. If you are interested in having more info, it’s pretty easy to track monthly “outflow” at a high level. About 6 years ahead of retirement I added a 5 minute step after balancing checkbook (yea, I still do that - it’s the Grand Central of our finances, like to keep a pulse on it.)
I total up cash withdrawals (not much in recent years) and checks (almost none) and autopays (lots) and Visa payment (the big item, since it includes many autopays). In retirement, we planned for “paychecks” from our investments to cover gap between our retirement income (small pensions + eventually SS) and avg spending. (Income tax needs and car purchase handled outside this exercise.)
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I am not suggesting that paying full fare for college is categorically a mistake for everyone and I’m glad it worked out for your family. I’m saying it was probably a financial mistake for us. On this very site over a decade ago, I blithely said that I didn’t understand why people who were in a position to pay full fare for a dream school didn’t just work a few more years for their kids to make it happen. I was in my late 40s. Now I’m 60 and I’ve come to understand what “working a few more years” actually means in terms of the cost, not just in money, but in time, life energy, and health. I also have a front row seat to my very elderly father’s expensive end-of-life suffering, something that I had no real understanding about when we were making our financial decisions about college. I did not really understand the implications of the course of action I advocated and took.
I don’t know if I would say I regret paying what we did for college. Life is about choosing the regrets you wish to have, and I’d rather regret paying too much than paying too little and wondering if I’d deprived my child of experiences and opportunities that could enrich her life (in all ways, not just monetarily). But I am speaking here only of financial choices, and I’ve come to the conclusion that ours have not always been optimal because they were based on wishful thinking and not a cold, hard view of our actual position economically. I wish we had balanced the lifelong disposition of our income and assets differently than we did. I am only speaking for myself.
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Even if your child went to a state school or a school where she got a merit scholarship, you still would have had to chip in when it came to paying housing and food costs and air travel if any. So the difference in total cost is not as great as you probably think. Yes, it is more expensive. Would that extra $100-150k have made a huge difference? That’s how I look at it. Of course, if one had to dip into a 401(k) that would have been bad. Most people I know who were paying for private schools financed tuition and room and board by foregoing travel and similar discretionary expenses, not necessarily extra savings for retirement.
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Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts about this. I think it can be very hard to admit to financial regrets that aren’t/weren’t “frivolous” purchases.
So many of the decisions that we’ve either regretted or celebrated have more to do with timing and luck (good and bad) than wise reflection and unfailing good decisions.
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Much of what you have been saying really speaks to me.
I also resonated with your previous comment about living in a community where keeping up and maybe having less than others in the community. I lived in such a community and now live in a completely different type of community, being one of the have mores and feeling okay not doing it all is very freeing to be honest.
We also sacrificed a lot to send our children to the school of their dreams. One was able to get FA but it was still a huge stretch for us. We also committed to them being debt free, we took over their debt which took us some very lean years to pay off.
Things we didn’t think of. That employment and retirement age wasn’t exactly our decision, employers can and do decide when your journey ends. It ended after that pesky debt was paid off but would have liked a few more years. We are fine, things worked out but we didn’t understand how the end was going to work.
We also did not understand the situation with our children marrying and the societal pressures in funding that. That’s one I regret more than anything. If I had known that we had to sacrifice so that the kids would be debt free and then lay out a ton of money for the wedding, well I might have done things differently. That is being very honest.
There is only so much money to go around. Our finances are not bottomless. I know that many here are not in our situation and I do understand. I’m also talking very honestly about mine.
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There was a $200k difference between what we ended up spending for D20 and what she ‘ideal world’ wanted.
We have three children. Just pushing that number out - that’s a $600k difference before investing time/compounding interest. Over the 15-20 years left we have until retirement, God willing and the creek don’t rise, that is a huge difference financially (conservatively projecting a 7% return over 15 years - that’s an additional $1.65million available to us).
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Yes, I have worshiped at the church of higher education, and admitting that our “offerings” were perhaps not 100% necessary or preferred feels a bit like becoming an apostate. 15 years ago, I looked down on people of similar SES to mine for spending on boats, vacations and houses instead of tuition. I told myself that my spending was somehow more virtuous than theirs. And that attitude was, frankly, self-delusion.
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Regret is part of life. We all have things we look back on and wish we had done differently. Like they say in Frozen, Let it Go. But use what you learned to inform future decisions. Let’s all give ourselves some grace for decisions that are in the past.
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Many years ago, when we were just embarking on the boarding school journey for our son, I posted my misgivings about the sanity and morality of spending almost a quarter of a million dollars on high school. Then, with college looming, we faced the possibility that, after draining the 529, we would have spent almost half a million dollars to educate one kid. Morally bankrupt is what came to mind. At the time, of course, we couldn’t know that his choice of a service academy would spare us the cost of college, but we still spent more on his HS education than anyone we knew spent on a university.
And that “investment” came at the cost of not saving a penny for retirement during those four years. When I lamented on the prep forum that BS would poke a four-year hole in our retirement savings, another poster kindly pointed out the tone-deaf privilege of that comment. I have never forgotten it.
So, @NJSue, I hear you. Luck played a role in where we ended up as our employment was not cut short, and the Military Family Tax Relief Act returned the 529 funds to us penalty-free to repair that savings hole, but it could have gone another way, and I would probably be thinking if not posting words very similar to yours.
Amen. (Thanks for that @kelsmom.)
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I was one of “those parents” who didn’t let kid go to most expensive college and take loans. (AND now he thanks me). We did save a lot for their college, and didn’t start taking really nice vacations until we had their school all taken care of.
I always told my kids 4 years in-state tuition, room and board. One got a big scholarship to a really good fit private school (RPI), so we did agree to pay for that (Paid significantly more than what we signed up for). We paid extra for a second because of issues going on at the time. When we offered to pay out of state tuition at top 5 business school for the third he said “Honestly mom, I don’t see the worth of paying more for that school than UMD,” (our state flagship). We had 3 in college at the same time for 2 years. The one who went to UMD (only public of the 3) landed best upon graduation, and continues to do well.
We continued to fund our retirements during college, and we took some nice vacations, especially once we knew we had 3rd kid covered. I always tried to find balance between “now” and the future, and I think it worked out fine for us. They appreciate that they have no debt, and know they were “lucky” (maybe not by CC standards, but in general) to leave school with no debt and a starter car.
We gave one kid who’s married some money for wedding, but they didn’t have a $50K wedding. I’ve always said I’m not that into weddings, and don’t plan to pay a lot for them. I suspect my husband will contribute more when his (only) daughter gets married, but I will stick to the amount we gave other kid, with maybe a slight bump for timing. @deb922, I totally understand the wedding $$$ frustration, especially when it wasn’t in “the plan.”
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I am one of the people who has posted multiple times on this thread that the most important thing to know for retirement financial planning is your expenses, but one financial planner did a quick calculation that went something like this
You know you make X
Subtract the amount you save for retirement from that
Subtract social security payment amount
Subtract what you tend to save every year
Maybe another thing or two
And that’s a good rough guesstimate for what you will need for similar lifestyle
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