I just retired in July, and doing a lot of reading on the City Data retirement forum helped me prepare for a spend down mindset instead of accumulation mindset. I started following that forum heavily a year before I retired, which really helped me a lot. For me I now will be living off on retirement investments and Social Security.
There is a general concept for drawing down investments that if you are pretty heavily in equities that you can take out about 4% a year and in a broad spectrum of scenarios expect your money to last for 30 years.
What I will be doing is taking out 3.5% initially which will give me with Social Security counted too my salary when I was working. And my plan is then to give myself a cost of living increase each year. And I will be monitoring to see if I am staying below that 4%. And actually I will with this budget due to monies I was when employed putting in a 401K, use that previous 15% to fund an annual Roth IRA for my son and the balance instead of being cash to me will be a Roth conversion (the Roth conversion money I hope to leave to my son, but is in a sense an additional retirement cushion). And interestingly those social security and Medicare taxes that used to come out of my paycheck add up to be what Medicare and a Medicare Supplement, part D and IRMA will cost me (very close to that - didn't have as high medical costs when employed, although I did have a 6K deductible and a 8.5K max out of pocket. Medicare will be super low on that front.). That's the plan I made and I am comfortable with that. I met with a Fidelity Advisor about my plans too, and they thought that all looked good (all there simulations had me having enough money for the 30 year period and they weren't even looking at the Roth money.), Anyway, that gave me the confidence to retire and start a new interesting life chapter while I am reasonably young and healthy.
And lol, my generous dad wants me and DH to be able to do a little extra traveling in our early retirement years and gave me a 50K retirement gift to be used toward travel (additional monies on top of my annual travel budget). We don't have a HUGE travel bug and have a budget that has allowed us to do a little travel all along (usually one bigger trip a year (week or so) and four shorter relative visit trips -- family is spread across the USA).
With this gift though we on top of our July Glacier National Park trip we are doing and taking DS and spouse on (normal budget in 2025), we are doing a second week long trip to Puerto Vallarta for a week in Feb. 2025 and taking DS and spouse on that too (Thank you dad!).
And I thought our cruising days are over, but here I am on this forum as we are considering one of the eight day / seven night small boat American Cruise line cruises due to dad's generous gift for our 2026 vacation. This is quite a bit more than we usually spend, so I look at it as a one time thing and haven't decided yet if we will take DS and spouse on this one too.
Anyway, just sharing my retirement financial spending plans in case that is of any help to you.
All I ever did really for retirement savings was put the 15% a year in a 401K - about 80% in equities, and that per financial advisor formulas at least at present looks like that will be enough for a financially comfortable and fun retirement. And seeing older relatives who are now in assisted living who wish they had done more fun things when they could, I am not inclined to be more conservative than my plan.
DH likes gambling and I want him to stay away from that on any vacation he goes on with me. I don't gamble. He'd like to do a cruise vacation again with me, but knows that I absolutely refuse to go with him on any ship with a casino (I don't see him enough - he spends too much time there - I won't make that mistake again ever), so that leaves a cruise without a casino or no cruise if he is vacationing with me. We mostly do land vacations to the Western USA, national parks, things like that on vacation. He'd like to mix it up and try another cruise and would be cool with the ship not having a casino (knows that's the only option I would do) and I told him I would research options (I'm the main family vacation planner as I enjoy things like that). Thank you everyone for all the replies! Appreciate knowing more options for this.
