Ask HN: What is your retirement plan? After retirement, what?
This is not a question for those with millions/billions in the bank, but for normal software people who have saved some money, but not enough to retire.
What age are you planning to retire? What do you plan to do after retirement? What are you doing to get there?
99 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadI haven't been able to purchase a home due to medical debt and the market conditions when I entered industry and the subsequent surges in home prices, so that's a large part of it, and I'm far too old where a bank will be comfortable giving me a thirty year mortgage, so my options are to rent or be homeless. That's a large part of it.
I implore you, if you're under the age of 30, buy a home now. Eat ramen for several years if you have to. Otherwise you will never retire.
If you're 42 now, you're in no sense too old to get a 30 year mortgage - who told you that? In any case, it's literally illegal under Federal law to use age as a factor when making a credit decision.
A bank would be delighted for a mortgage holder to die, causing the property to be sold and the loan to be repaid, if prevailing interest rates had risen since the loan was created.
It's very sad that OP has been under the impression that age has anything to do with a loan term.
They don't, it is illegal on the federal level to use age as a factor when determining eligibility for most loans (including mortgages) in the US. Check the "must not discourage you from applying or reject your application [...] based on these factors" section of this page[0] on the FTC website.
That concern about age is just how the parent comment imagines it works, without checking how it actually is first.
0. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/mortgage-discrimination
You keep cash in your mattress or what? You worked and lived through one of the greatest bull runs in history, did you really not put a penny into a 401k or IRA??
I wouldn't assume this, you can always try. The criteria will be based on your income and savings and the cost of the home at the time of the mortgage. You may need to move to a lower cost of living area than wherever you are now, though.
To obey some societal expectations?
The "you should have a job and it should give you meaning" thing is the societal expectation that needs the most interrogation.
Honestly, of there's anything you love well enough to become passably good at it, to me it makes more sense to keep doing that, making money or no money, than to sit around and do nothing.
Even if your "work" is the "personal work" of growing to understand cultures and becoming a more grounded, well-rounded human being while traveling the world, there are always opportunities to add value and receive that back in money.
"Retirement" as most people seem to mean it, just sitting around waiting to die, sounds so bleak by comparison to finding something you love to do.
That's exactly how I see it. I can't fathom why one would willfully chose to do that, barring serious illness or injury (and even then, why spend your precious time waiting for death instead of being the change you want to see in the world?)
Man, I'm sorry, there's just so much wrong with this take. You should seriously hang out with more retired people if you think they're just 'sitting around, waiting to die'.
I really take issue with the fact that we're expected to sell our 40 best years of our lives to work on things we're not passionate about to make other people rich.
Retirement, for me, is simply crossing the point where you work on your own terms for passion and purpose instead of money.
Initially at least I want to be able to pay off a mortgage and own my own house, so that whatever retirement ends up being, will have to be much less.
One of the perks of academia. You can retire, but prevent boredom.
Before going completely off the rails your last couple of years will be co-publishing papers with ChatGPT and getting listed as 2nd author.
No no, you're not thinking far enough in the future. Give it enough time and there won't be any more snow!
Plan on retiring before 40.
> What are you doing to get there?
Maxing all retirement accounts, putting leftover money into taxable accounts, and letting compound interest do it's thing.
> What do you plan to do after retirement?
This is definitely an open question, and I sometimes feel uncomfortable when I think about it. Saving for retirement is my life goal and when I achieve it, I bet I will soon feel empty. That multi-decade challenge that took thousands of hours will be completed, and now what? I don't know how I am going to fill my weekdays for another possibly 50-60 years. It will be a great problem to have, I just don't have a solution yet.
This assumes a 4% withdrawal rate per year.
A quick wish list of things I'd love to do when I retire (of course this is a long ways away right now, so it's very tentative): - Focus more on exercise and health. - Hike and camp more, and enjoy the beautiful parks the U.S. has to offer. - Motorcycle around, maybe go on long road trips. - Connect with my kids more, and help them with their own kids. - Be more social, and have people over more often. - Keep contributing to open source. - Cultivate my drawing and writing skills - Maybe move to Europe for a bit. I love the idea of living in someplace like the Irish countryside, with their beautiful culture, history, and landscape.
But given my family history, it's not ha-ha funny insomuch as 50/50.
It may be bad for the person who finds me, but think how I'll feel.
My house is paid off (bought in 1999, paid extra each month, just paid it off a couple of years ago (30-year mortgage paid off in 23 years)) and both of my kids will be finished with college in the summer of 2030, so that gives me around 8 years to save up. I'm not putting any faith in my 401k or any investments. If they pan out, then cool, but having cash-in-hand when I retire is much more comforting.
After retirement, I plan on staying un-injured and not falling for any money-stealing scams for as long as possible. I'll write software when I feel like it. I'll experiment with new tech if and when it's cool enough to pry myself away from chatting up my fellow retirees and drinking excessively.
My current retirement plan is to work outside of academia until I die.
After I do that for a while, I'll enjoy the world and what it has to offer. Whatever that means, with whatever savings is still available.
Overall I expect that I should be able to happily draw $140,000+ a year during retirement and have that NEVER run out. My wife is a teacher and should be able to pull $40,000-50,000 during retirement as well. Medical would be taken through her retirement plan. Household income between $150,000 and $200,000 during retirement.
Honestly? I don't want to retire. Why would I? I love working on computers, from my basement office and working remotely is great. I have a kid, I would expect to take 2-3, months off a year for less money, but that's not a problem to me.
What would I do with retirement? Clean my house more? walk my dogs more? travel more? Maybe? Work is great and just find something / someone you like working for, have enough fuck you money to not care if you get fired and the rest is gravy.
I think I'm far more likely to leave the programming career (web development) and pursue a masters in something like quantum computing or physics than I am to retire.
I would invest up to the matching in a 401k up to the limit, and then invest in some good tech companies for long term gains.
I generally feel the same way, but even in my mid-30s I've noticed that my energy levels have definitely trended downwards over time. And I'm doing all the right things: eating healthy, exercising, using standing desk, etc. Nothing too extreme at this point, but I also notice this trend in older relatives and coworkers, so the possibility of this happening to me seems very real and worth planning for.
If it does, there will be a point where I don't have enough energy to put into a full-time job plus everything else I need to do to live, and so it'll make sense to retire then. And if I end up feeling just as spry as I do now in 40 years, then sure why not just keep working?
These are wild figures. Most adventurous rules of thumb are about 4-5% over inflation. If you have a way to be confident in getting 7-9% pa over 30 years quit your day job and pile your time into whatever that secret is.
Then you’re pulling out 4% + fees a year which is also around the point of confident adventurousness. Many now say 3-3.5% including fees.
Good luck to you.
Here's one source that supports the 7-9% range over the last 30 years: https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-stock-market-retu....
1920 to 2022: 7.38% (adjusted for inflation) https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1920?amount=1...
1989 to 2022: 7.4% (adjusted for inflation) https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1989?amount=1...
I have almost come to terms with I just need to live now and stop the voices of all the people that put this shit in my head for the last 40 years of "oh just do X and it's easy to retire! then that's when you life can start!". Life was completely different when I grew up- people had jobs with pensions, healthcare was all in, education was cheap.
But it's hard to push that shit away in your head. Plus I don't trust financial markets worth a damn. I work in the industry, this entire concept of "investing" that the rich have shoved into the middle class is absolutely disgusting and not the way the world should work.
So there's that.
My plan is to make sure I retire somewhere in this country there is fresh water and hopefully some protection from food shortages. Probably near the Great Lakes.
If circumstances arise in which I decide that retirement is a good option, I will live pretty much the same way that I do now, except that I may undertake less activity at someone else's behest. I say "may" rather than "will" because I already do some work pro bono because people ask me to help them with something.
So my plan is not to retire, per se. As I become more and more financially independent, I'm simply going to tailor the work that I do and the time that I spend on it to match whatever my desires are. No working on boring projects because it pays well, etc.
In my perfect world, which I will admit is a fetch, one of my side projects will get traction and I'll make enough to pay for a further two decades of unprofitable-but-fun projects. Or I'll win the lottery I don't buy tickets for.
It really helps that I enjoy coding and could happily do it until I croak, I don't consider it work. I keep getting roped into management though.
I say the same, and I joke that I'm only slightly more delusional than the folks who play and think they can win
If someone asks, I also like to say that the odds of finding a winning powerball ticket on the ground are not significantly different from the odds of buying one yourself.
I can't back that up with real statistical modeling or anything, but given that the best odds are north of 1 in 200 million, it's close enough.
So not much difference from working at IBM?
I mostly have fond memories of those days. That was a different IBM than today. Back then when they moved you to another office across the country, IBM would buy your current house from you at market price so you could easily make the move and buy a new house where you were going. My dad did that a couple times before landing permanently in Portland.
[0] speaking of the picnics, I recall the joke about how the PCjr was created. The engineers and sales folks were very competitive, and during some heated talk at a picnic, the sales folks boasted that they were so good they could sell *anything* the engineers could dream up. Engineer reply: "Wanna bet?"
We had a PCjr ourselves. They gave them out to employees for peanuts.
I'm living somewhat frugally (but not with a particular budget), working in a high pay field, and not planning on having children unless I marry a wealthy spouse that enables me to achieve these goals despite the added cost of children.
Still, realistically probably not until at least 45-50 since I started saving relatively late (around 30).