Ok, so we are old and retired. Now what??

[cemanuel]

(03-31-2022, 07:56 AM)fenders53 Wrote: Looks good. I love homemade bread.

Need to work on evenly dividing the dough but I'll give it another go before I buy a kitchen scale. Big loaf doesn't fit in the toaster.

[MikeWa]

Need to work on evenly dividing the dough but I'll give it another go before I buy a kitchen scale. Big loaf doesn't fit in the toaster.
[/quote]

I've been making my own bread for years, but buying a kitchen scale 3 years ago changed the whole experience. Not only it is easier to prepare ingredients, but also my loaves are now equal, which makes baking and storing much easier. I bake two loaves every 2-3 weeks, cut them into slices, pack into small portions in the ziplocks and freeze them.

[cemanuel]

(03-31-2022, 09:11 AM)MikeWa Wrote: Need to work on evenly dividing the dough but I'll give it another go before I buy a kitchen scale. Big loaf doesn't fit in the toaster.

I've been making my own bread for years, but buying a kitchen scale 3 years ago changed the whole experience. Not only it is easier to prepare ingredients, but also my loaves are now equal, which makes baking and storing much easier. I bake two loaves every 2-3 weeks, cut them into slices, pack into small portions in the ziplocks and freeze them.
[/quote]

I did better yesterday but I probably spent 10 minutes pulling dough from one loaf to another. Suspect I'll pick a scale up Monday.

My Susie Homemaker Day wore me out. Not sure why - I've cleaned house before but incorporating it into bread baking seems to require a different fitness level. Then again, no bread machine and no stand mixer. Once you get to the last couple of cups of flour the initial dough mixing makes for a nice upper body workout.

[crimsonghost747]

Time for a little update.
Finally looks like I'm in more or less retirement mode, that took a bit longer than expected.
But we did move to a new country again, so yeah... that was a hassle. But now it starts to feel like I'm settled down and the house starts to be in order etc.

Feels like I have a good rhythm now. I wake up and take it easy for a while. Then do productive things for a few hours, maybe from 9am to noon, and then it's time to just relax, have a walk in the park and enjoy life. Could be worse I guess!

[NilesMike]

May I ask how old some you are? I'm 62.5 and still working enough to qualify for Medical insurance. When I qualify for Medicare I will work less and would like to do mid day activities. Tennis, bowling and very casual open hockey.

I see myself working as long as I am able. 2-3 days a week 4-5 hours at a time just to keep a routine and have more socialization. I think the limited socialization that some people face is very detrimental to one's overall well being.

[fenders53]

(07-05-2022, 06:12 AM)NilesMike Wrote: May I ask how old some you are? I'm 62.5 and still working enough to qualify for Medical insurance. When I qualify for Medicare I will work less and would like to do mid day activities. Tennis, bowling and very casual open hockey.

I see myself working as long as I am able. 2-3 days a week 4-5 hours at a time just to keep a routine and have more socialization. I think the limited socialization that some people face is very detrimental to one's overall well being.

I am a few months away from 60.  I agree on the socialization aspect.  I miss it a lot some days and will need to adjust my routine a bit.  No work at least for this year.  I sold a rental on a short contract several years ago.  The buyer informed me he intended to make large weekly payments and pay me off, and he is doing exactly that.  My tax plan just got altered so no more taxable income from work this year.

[crimsonghost747]

(07-05-2022, 06:12 AM)NilesMike Wrote: May I ask how old some you are? I'm 62.5 and still working enough to qualify for Medical insurance. When I qualify for Medicare I will work less and would like to do mid day activities. Tennis, bowling and very casual open hockey.

I see myself working as long as I am able. 2-3 days a week 4-5 hours at a time just to keep a routine and have more socialization. I think the limited socialization that some people face is very detrimental to one's overall well being.

I'm in my 30's. 
And while it would be very plausible for me to go back to work at some point, I really don't think I will.
It's definitely necessary to do something productive, but for me it's very important that this "productive" is something that I want to do, and that I can do it when I feel like doing it. 

Now I work maybe 1-2h/day (~5 days a week), just simple stuff... clicking away on the laptop while drinking coffee and reading the morning news. Or maybe in the afternoon I'm having a beer on the balcony and feel like working for an hour. Important point: this work is 100% on my own terms. No boss, no deadlines, no time requirements, no stress. And then I probably spent another couple of hours per day studying. I do need to add some more physical exercise into my routines, and if I start to get bored then I'll looking into some sort of smaller projects to do on the side. (maybe start a small company??)

[cemanuel]

I'd forgotten this thread existed. Age. Anyway, I posted this on SA yesterday morning re my first six months of retirement.

-------------------------

I'm not sure how useful this will be for people but occasionally folks have expressed interest in how what I'd call "retirement execution" has been, compared to the plan someone put together before hanging up the alarm clock. This is my experience.

I've started keeping a retirement log. Sort of my version of Dear Diary. I've always found it interesting to look back over time and see how my thinking/investing/lifestyle has changed over time and my memory is more accurate if I write things down. Yesterday I took some time to work on a summary of my first six months of retirement.

This is far longer than appropriate for a comment. In past days I would have made a blog post, or maybe several posts, encompassing this.

The first half concerns what I think about being retired and a little on how I adjusted to owning my own life. The second half gets into the finances and how my funding plan has matched up with reality.

If you want the real cliff notes version you can go to the bullet points at the end.

First Six Months, July 11, 2022

RETIREMENT LIFE

For the first month or so of retirement I was a little “Out of Sorts.” I don’t know a better way to put it. I suddenly had nobody telling me what to do with any aspect of my life. For me, this was the first time – ever.

- For the prior 32 years I’d been working for someone who put various conditions on my life and time.
- For the 7 previous years I’d worked for myself but you still have responsibilities to your clients, employees, and yourself.
- Before that I was in school or at home with parents telling me what to do.

Suddenly - and it is sudden - I 100%, completely, owned my life.

So the first month or so was just weird. I didn’t hear the following advice until about a month before I retired but after I’d already filed the paperwork. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also hanging it up on 12/31/21 and he mentioned that someone told him that retiring during the winter in our area was a bad idea unless you were either a winter activity enthusiast or headed south for the winter. Neither category fits me and I now agree with it. All other things being equal, waiting until April 1 would have been better.

After about a month my time started to fill in. I meet other retirees at a coffee shop at least once, sometimes twice a week. I was taking “day trips” to visit people within a 2-3 hour drive who I hadn’t seen in a while. And I had my IRA rollover starting in late February which sure took a chunk of time off my hands (more on that below). Once we got to April this problem resolved itself with work to do around home.

I have a handle on things now. I work 3-5 hours/day on my place most days. Read some. Look at investments some, cook and clean house one day a week, visit folks, and am learning chess.

Now for the benefits. My life is my own, not anyone else’s. I can’t describe how liberating this is. Stress levels are way down. I sleep much, much better. Through the night mostly. Interestingly, I don’t get up any later but get about 6.5 hours sleep and am good to go, usually around 5-5:30, occasionally 6:30. I also eat better and mostly what I make myself.

Last summer I was having some heart issues. Completely gone. Here’s a very personal anecdote but who cares. Last May I had a colonoscopy and the Dr didn’t like what he saw – no cancer but a lot of polyps, color off, etc. He wanted to see me this year. After this year he doesn’t want to see me for another 5.

And this took a little while to show up but it seems that 20 years have been taken off my joints. My weight hasn’t changed much and I worked out last year. The only thing I can attribute this to is motion. When working, many days I would be parked at my desk 3-4 hours at a time working on something. I’d try to make myself get up and take a quick stroll every hour or two but still. Now I just move. Nothing intentional though I am working outside a fair amount but I just don’t stay in one spot. It was probably May before I noticed it though I’m sure it was coming on earlier.

From my perspective, I can’t speak highly enough about being retired.

THE FINANCES

My retirement funding plan is pretty simple. The plan is to use two sources:

1) Dividend Income from my Taxable Account alone – about 80%
2) Periodic stock sales of AAPL and GOOGL from my Taxable Account – about 20%

Prior to retiring I built up a cash reserve. Around June/July 2021 I quit using dividends received to buy more stocks and I also quit investing excess money from my paycheck but built my bank account up.

I calculated that with my expected expenses this would give me enough cash to live on for 6-8 months and with dividend withdrawals I likely wouldn’t need to sell any stocks during 2022.

This has not worked out precisely as I thought. During the first few months of retirement my expenses were actually lower than I expected. Not a lot but overall maybe 5% less than when I was working, even with paying for my own health care. Just removing driving, the odd meal out, a bottle of pop here, a cup of coffee there, etc., I lived on less through March. In April I owed some for taxes but May was the budget-buster.

May was always gonna be my highest expense month of the year as my property taxes and property and vehicle insurance are all due. I have a $5k deductible health plan (80/20 to the $5k) so I also received a nice bill for the colonoscopy AND my sister decided to visit. That wasn’t terrible but I bought good seats to a Kenny Chesney concert, we ate out at nice places a couple of times, visited some spots, etc. Not complaining but it cost money.

THEN I got talked into going on a Danube River cruise in December where the full balance was due by June 30. The essence of this is that once I got the medical bill I realized my cash reserves would be used up in May, not June or July and made a big withdrawal April 29. I had always thought I might make stock sales while holding back cash but with where the market has gone I’ve used the cash.

All of this is fine and I haven’t had to sell any stocks yet but . . .

Starting in April my monthly expenses popped quite a bit higher than when I was working. The reason is I was able to tackle some of the bigger jobs around home that I had been putting off. So I bought some lumber, tools here and there, paint & supplies, and so on. I also have two outbuildings that will need new roofs and am getting estimates on.

I am also planning large IRA conversions and will need to pay taxes. And of course there’s the cruise. Bottom line is that where before I thought stock sales would wait until 2023, I will likely need to make some within the next couple of months. This is OK – I have a pretty big safety margin – but it is a bit different from how I had scripted it.

The IRA: I rolled over the IRA from my 403b and made buys over a three-week period spanning late February-early March. The IRA is a Total Return account so I have a different mix than in my Taxable Account though there is some overlap. I gained a little bit on the market by taking it to cash about a week before I started buying. Overall I have, as of now, made most of my buys about halfway between earlier market highs and recent market lows. I have not done a lot of trading in it yet. Other than the about 7% in speculative stocks, I like the long-term prospects for every other company I own. So I’ll just wait and stick with my plan of making trims when I think something has become substantially overvalued. It helps that this (and the Roth) is money I should never need to live on.

I am looking for S&P 3500 to make about a $70k IRA conversion. If I reach a point where I don’t think the market will get there I will go ahead. The strongest candidates at the moment are a couple of the chip companies which are down a lot.

The only other investing move is that as my accumulated IRA dividends reach $1,000 I convert them to the Roth and make buys there. I’ve also turned off the drip in the Roth. It’s not much but adds to the cash for purchases.

In summary:

- Retirement is great! I had an adjustment period but it wasn’t too bad.

- My finances have been somewhat different but holding up well.
I did not account for the fact that having time to do large home projects would result in large home expenses. Logical but not something I thought through. On the plus side, after this year the large expenditures will mostly be taken care of, probably.

- With the market drop my timeline for IRA conversions has moved up – I was originally looking at late in the year to balance amounts out for taxes. Not a problem, actually an opportunity, but different from the plan.

Subsequent summaries will be shorter as I won't spend nearly as much time on the first section.

[crimsonghost747]

Thanks for posting that Cemanuel.
For one, it's great to see how good retirement has been for your health. It's amazing when you actually feel better than you did before, isn't it?

I really do like the idea of writing a sort of a "retirement diary", and I'm definitely going to start one. It won't be public, it certainly won't be written well, but I do like the idea of writing down a paragraph or two once in a while (quarterly might be good for me) just noting down the basics of what it feels like to be retired. Assuming that I still have a couple of decades of life left in me, it'd be a pretty interesting way to see how my retirement life has evolved (and how I've felt about those developments) over time.

[cemanuel]

The thing I probably should have tossed in is that, assuming I make large conversions each year, my funding plan will need to be closer to 70-30 than 80-20 dividends to stock sales. Though my DGR is over 10%. Not a problem. AAPL is the largest position and I have a fair amount of GOOGL but it is a change, probably. I'll know better after a year. I'll take the tax expense now over the big RMDs in 13 years.

[fenders53]

I think I have sufficient assets for myself so I started a 401K port for my only child. It's buy a share or two when the stock is crushed. The new port is actually very green after a month but I am only buying extreme dips in whatever sector is getting crushed this week. It's not an amazing feat when you start a port 6 months into a correction but still fun.

[crimsonghost747]

(07-15-2022, 06:16 PM)fenders53 Wrote: I think I have sufficient assets for myself so I started a 401K port for my only child. It's buy a share or two when the stock is crushed. The new port is actually very green after a month but I am only buying extreme dips in whatever sector is getting crushed this week. It's not an amazing feat when you start a port  6 months into a correction but still fun.

No doubt that a correction is a good time to start a project such as this one.