I promised to spill the tea this week and reveal some big news that I’ve been working on and can finally share with you. I don’t know how to say it so I’m just going to tell you. My husband submitted his letter of resignation at his job April 8th. He’s retiring. Effective June 3rd.
I think it would be big news no matter what way you look at it, but let me tell you why it feels especially big to me. My husband is 58 years old. I’m 59. We never set out to retire….what some folks would say is “early.” In fact, looking back, we did a lot of things wrong. That’s a great reminder that even if you screw up, you need to keep going, because a screw up–or even several–doesn’t mean you won’t reach your goals. But I digress.
So how did we get here? Four years ago, you know, back when we all had some time to think, my husband and I did some adulting. We sat down with advisors from two different financial institutions to get the lay of the land to see where we were from a financial perspective.
Because we are of a certain age, because we grew up in the Midwest, because we are working class, we always expected to work until we were 65–or is it 67 now?, because that was the retirement age. And we had our fingers firmly crossed that we would have enough money to retire at age 65. But, like a lot of people, we were terrified we hadn’t saved enough. So we set some appointments with a certain sense of dread. As one does.
Much to our amazement, both of the appointments in 2020 went better than expected. We were told that we’d have more than enough money to retire. One of the advisors actually said, “You’ve saved too much.” How is that even possible? So we adjusted to this new information, happy with the knowledge that we were doing better than expected.
We ended up preferring one advisor over the other and met with him several more times over the past several years, each time asking bolder and bolder questions. And the answers to every bold question–and there were many–came back in the affirmative. “Yes, you can have that, too.”
As I got braver, the bold question I finally asked last year was if we could retire before we turned 65. You could have knocked me over with a feather when the answer came back “yes!” The elephant in the room where retiring early is concerned is always healthcare, because in this country healthcare is tied to a person’s job, often preventing folks from retiring until they are eligible to receive Medicare benefits at 65.
In preparation for our January meeting with TIAA I had asked our advisor to plan for Cory to retire in early 2025. We were shocked when the plan he created allowed for Cory to retire immediately.
But here’s the thing. Cory wasn’t there mentally. And that made no sense to me. So I laid out a campaign to convince him to retire. Catch my plan and my answers in anticipation of your questions on Episode 10 of My Act Four.
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