To me retirement age is when someone decides to retire. A lot of people think the retirement age is 62 because they hear that’s the average age people retire and the earliest they can collect social security. I know people that retired at age 51 and others that waited until 70, the current age to receive full social security benefits is 67. When someone decides to retire it’s their decision and they shouldn’t whine if they don’t have enough money to have the retirement they expected.
What age do you plan to retire or if already retired when did you do it?
I retired at 55 and have no regrets either that I retired too early or should’ve gone earlier.
I used to think that but I’ve changed my mind, I’ll take the minimum benefit when I’m eligible. My thinking is that I’ll be using more money a 62 than I will be at 70. Also, the dollars at age 62 are worth more than they are 8 years later.
I retired from a boss at 61. I don’t think I would have made it thru 2019 had I stayed. I took social security at 62. I was 8 months away from full retirement on my pension, but the penalty was less than .5% so it was worth taking it early. I took a 50% lump some and get the other half in monthly installments. . State law says that anybody taking the pension had to be offered health insurance until they are 65, although I’d have to pay the full amount ($800 per month) when I had been paying $50 per month. I ran a spreadsheet multiple times and it showed I could do this. I pulled the trigger and retired. I do not regret it at all.
The odd thing is that it was financially better for me to retire than to stay working since a “disciplinary measure” cut my pay by 25% starting in 2019. I retired January 1 - three days after my 20 year anniversary. My retirement income is about what my previous take home pay was. If I stayed on I would have either had to get a second job, which I didn’t want to do in my 60’s…I could sell my house and take the equity to use to pay rent thru retirement, but i had just done several improvements to the house and didn’t want to sell. My third option was to retire Because of the money I save by not having to buy gas or lunches every week, I actually came out ahead.
I’ve always lived a simpler life - my bicycle is my only “luxury” item that I have. Many people will make a lot more than I do in retirement, but I am happy. My job never defined me so I didn’t feel any “loss of purpose” by retiring and devoting that time to leisure activities…I worked for over 45 years and now it’s my time to kick back. And work was so stressful that it wasn’t worth the few extra dollars in Social Security that I would have had if I waited. Also, I likely would have died before collecting Social Security had I stayed.
One benefit of retiring well before Medicare is that my part A premium is based on my tax returns from 2022… I had been retired f since 2019 by then, so my modified adjusted gross income was much lower, so I pay the minimal amount.
Plus it it would take several years for you to “break even” if you waited. So I’ll “break even” in about another 10 years. Considering the males in my family don’t have a great track record for longevity, I don’t have a problem. If I happen to be the exception - I’m still glad I took it early.
I did the math, if I wait til 70 to take SS I need to live to 89 to make money over taking it at 62. I’d like to think that will happen but why do I need a massive check at 89? I’d rather have a smaller check at 62.
Retired at 63 1/2. Had planned on working until 66 but my dad had dementia and mom needed more help taking care of him and routine household stuff. I sat down with a pad and pencil and played with the numbers and surprisingly, between SS, a small pension, wife working part time, me working a couple of days a month, the monthly bottom line wasn’t a lot different than working.
I haven’t touched my personal retirement accounts and although we have always lived pretty thrifty, we live comfortable. Take a nice trip or two each year and are satisfied with with the decisions we made. Wife still works part time as a book keeper, I still work a day or two a month at my old job. No regrets.
Same here, my social security will allow me to take less out of my retirement accounts allowing them to grow even more. Plus tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, I’m taking the money the earliest I can.
My wife and retired at 51 and 52, sold pur house and moved cross country. All the stars aligned in a short time period and we decided to take the leap. No regrets and think everyone who can, should. I think that probably added at least 10 years to my life.
My buddy retired at 51. He put 32 years in with the company, had a pension, socked a lot away in the 401K, had his house paid off and no debt. He worked part time at a Harley dealer for $10 an hour cash and would go to Florida for a couple months every year.
I didn’t calculate in social security when I started retirement planning over 30 years ago, I figured it would be gone. We’ll take it at 62 and between me and my wife it’ll be around $4,000 a month allowing us to take less from our retirement accounts allowing them to grow. I’m sure my son will be happy about that one day.
I am still 20 years away. Hope to retire early 60’s or sooner if savings allows.
I might partially retire and pick up a handful of tax returns or contract cpa work in feb-apr. I could probably make $40k-50k working a couple peak months. 20 years from now that might be $60k or more with inflation.
I think that people with stressful jobs have a tendency to retire as soon as they can while people who still enjoy their career tend to stay in the workforce longer.
I could leave this year but like my job, the company and most of my co-workers. My wife works at a school and likes her job, it’s a few blocks from home and she has a lot of time off. We’ll probably retire in a couple years at age 59.
Here is my offense. We had medical records software and a laptop in room for colposcopy’s (it’s a women’s health procedure). We had a doctor who came in twice a month to do them for 2 hours on the days he was there. There is a nurse that would assist. She signed on to the laptop…but the doctor signed in to the medical records software using his ID, They had been doing this for almost 10 years. The county issued a new security policy and one of them was users had to log on to a computer with their ID, which the doctor had not been doing. And I wasn’t even there during hours he worked. .I knew it but I didn’t tell them to start having her log off the PC and the doctor log on with his. There was NOTHING outside of the medical records system that was accessed on that laptop. We were discussing some things with the nurses director and I mentioned that, but did not check back with the director to see if they stopped the practice. They hadn’t but I didn’t report this to the department director since they had been doing this for over 10 years. Ironically THIS process had set up by my boss who was disciplining me when she was in a different position.
They called in HR (the angels of death) and I was put on administrative leave for violating a county policy. We met at the end (on my 20 year anniversary date) and I was told that I was being transferred to an insulting minor position in the county IT department and my pay was cut by 25%. They also wrote that I was incapable of doing the job that I had done for the past 20 years. I left, took the paperwork I completed to start the process to start taking my pension and faxxed it in. On the first day of my new job, when they were going to introduce (humiliate) me to my new “team”…most that I have known for 20 years, I handed them my resignation for retirement.
I knew the county security director when I found out and told him and he basically said “you’re kiddng…right?” But he wasn’t consulted about it.
The only reason that they didn’t fire me was that we were in the middle of implementing a new medical records system and I was heading up that project. The nursing director, whom was a good friend, told me that they asked “is he gone?” and they replied, “well, he’s not gone gone”. As I headed back home, my phone rang before I got to the freeway and it was the angel of death calling to ask if I could delay my retirement long enough to bring someone else up to speed on where we were in the conversion. I told her that I felt bad about leaving them in a lurch like this, and as much as I would like to accomodate them, they had just told me that I wasn’t qualified to do that job. She immediately offered to restore my pay, but I declined because I didn’t want any paperwork snags to delay starting my pension.
After I had left, they had to figure out the month end reporting process I developed…even though I provided detailed documentation and put it in a folder my boss had set up for that purpose - she never looked there. She said I was not willing to go thru “self improvement” training by taking classes in Microsoft Access. I told her that I actually knew quite a bit from being self taught. Plus, I told her I didn’t see the sense in paying for training for someone who was going to be retiring in a couple of years. She took that as a refusal. My month end process utilized Microsoft Access extensively so she called the county database people into 'reverse engineer" what I had set up. One of my friends who was there told me that the director of the database group was working with them and asked her who designed this. My boss, with an air of self satisfaction, told them that I did. He told her that what I had done was VERY advanced and that smile left her face. And again - I left detailed documentation in a folder specified by her on exactly what I was doing. All she would have had to do was look.
She wanted me to implement reporting system to track our strategic planning goal on new software the county was using, but that software was not designed to do what we were trying to do. So was working with the developer of that software to try an make it do that. I was told I was the first person in the country trying to do something like this. I was making progress, but my boss couldn’t understand or wouldn’t accept that the software wasn’t designed to do what she wanted it to do. Any time I tried to explain that, she would tell me that I just didn’t want to do it
I contemplated suing the county and contacted the former head of the legal department. He said I didn’t have a case because I left on my own accord and was not fired. To fight it would be expensive and I would likely lose on that. I didn’t care. Retiring was the best thing I ever did. I actually enjoyed my job, but my boss had me taking Xanax pretty regularly and made me dread going into work. I would have had to continue facing those stresses as well as the humiliation of working with people in IT who knew what my old job was and none of them wanted it because I had to know a bit about everything - hardware, operating system, software, networking, as well as the Microsoft office products. They were all specialized in what they did. Plus, the lower pay combined with the increased costs of traveling to the new job location would have put me in a financial bind. I wrote my director and bosses director to tell them I did not do this out of spite. My options were to get a second job, which I wasn’t going to start doing after age 60. I could sell my house,which I had just spent money on improving, or I could retire. Retirement was the most financially acceptable way to go. I also pointed out that I only had one income while they had two sources of household income. Both of them had a gross household income of over $250k. I wasn’t even making $100K. And I asked them if a 25% pay cut would impact their lifestyle.
So that’s why I retired from a boss more than I retired from a job. And while I couldn’t sue them, Since I had never started the “new” job at the lower pay rate, by unused vacation and sick time were paid at my higher pay rate.