Friday, July 03, 2020

An End and A Beginning

All my life, I've been working towards a financially sustainable retirement with a comfortable/conservative margin of safety.   I've been consistently frugal, living below our means, and maximizing savings through coupons, sales, deals and minimizing tax liabilities.  I've been a ruthless detailed numbers person, evaluating different options and scenarios, and sweating through the 08/09 recession and the 20 recessions while in retirement.

We're on track to achieve that margin of safety in this year on in 2021.  Barring a major financial disruption, I expect we can easily maintain our current lifestyle even with 3% inflation per year for the next 22 years.   Probably even for double that many years, but I haven't done the detailed analysis.    This includes putting 2 kids through college debt free in the next 15 years.  I can probably back off day to day managing/scrutiny of our retirement investments... unless there is a major event such as elimination of Social Security, high inflation, or a long term market crash.

Now that the financial part is mostly done, what's next?

Next is determining how we want to enjoy a financially sustainable retirement.   I want to give this some thought and discussion since we are shifting mindsets from how we got here, e.g frugal, living below our means, etc.  To me, I think we are more likely to run out of time than out of money.  So I want to answer a couple questions to start.  What do I want to spend (more) time on doing next?    How do we want to spend money to give us more time?    For me, that will be the beginning of a new chapter in our retirement journey.

For more on  Reaping the Rewards, check back  Fridays for a new segment.

This is not financial, retirement, investment nor life advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

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