Retirement Thread

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by philfree

I'm looking at early retirement. Not really by choice as the business I'm in has pretty much run it's course and it's time to shut it down. I'll be 63 in August and I wish I had four more years of business for the income but more importantly at this point the health insurance. I'm going to end up paying for my health insurance out of my pocket for a couple of years and that sucks. I own my home and cars outright, I don't have a lot of bills and I do have a substantial amount of cash in investments and my retirement fund. I should be able to live off dividends alone for four years till I'm 67 so that's good. We're going have to learn how to live on a budget though and we haven't really ever had to do that.

How much a month is enough for a comfortable retirement? $5,000.00, $10,000.00 or somewhere in between?

Create a SS account. You don't have to file. You can do that at anytime later. But, they have a calculator on their site that will tell you how much you will receive if you retire on "X" date. You can move the slider over to see what it would be at 62 years of age when your eligible all the way to your FRA(Full retirement age) and beyond all the way up to 70.

I was going to "retire" in the SS system but using that slider I was able to figure out I was gaining $17 a month by waiting. Then you just do the math that worked for you. $17 per month X 12 months etc. I "retired" officially this month. Was going to wait until FRA but did the math and we decided we would have more money in our pocket in the long run to take the SS now.

Redditt has the most SS feedback from any of the other sites I've visited. Just join the sub-reddit's and you will see lots of varied opinions and you can decided what's BS and what's not. Or this thread gets used by posters here, then you can already know if this poster posting in here is FOS.