There are two most common surprises that you almost always hear from retirees once they have made the transition. There are many factors retirees can decide before they take any decision with regard to retirement. So, after they are retired they realized that they were unnecessarily worried about their future and they made a right decision. Following are the two biggest surprises most retirees talk about within 9-12 months of their retirement.
Thoughts of people about early Retirement
Most of the people I recently met with and who have retired this year i.e. 2023 have shared that they took a unwise decision for working for a longer period they have waited retired earlier. Most of them pointed out that the biggest reason they did not earlier apply for retirement due to an unknown fear about their future. According to them, they were worried about what would they do after retirement as retirement money was not enough to make ends meet, as they were making more while working.
They were also apprehensive that how would they spend their time home and how would they make new friends. So, transition into retirement was scary due to these factors. And one of the biggest transitions, surprisingly, is transitioning from always saving your money and putting money into their retirement savings to actually using retirement savings for what they saved it for and what you sacrificed for.
According to them, on one hand they were undecisive about their retirement due to above-mentioned reasons while on the other hand, they wanted to get early retirement to enjoy rest of their lives, spend some time with their loves ones and to explore the world. To my understanding that is actually spent and to enjoy your life and to not just pay for the necessities, but to pay for adventures and experiences and things that are going to bring you joy.
Having a Financial Plan
But I think it is really important to have not just a financial plan that’ll say, here is how much you can spend. And you know, the one thing we know is things are not going to go according, exactly according to game plan, but we can adjust as we go. But here is the game plan and there is no reason to sacrifice unnecessarily. I would say about half of people when they first retire are still saving 10, 15, 20% of their budgeted amount that they are supposed to be spending. And why do people do that? They do it because it’s just who we are. S,o it takes time to learn to actually give yourself permission and to make that transition to actually spending money.
Another thing that people need to get to really to master in retirement and it’s when they can start to feel a sense of relief is, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that is a lot of time. And before we had a scarcity of time but when you retire for a while, you are going to have an abundance of time.
Few questions pop up in your mind are that how are you going to spend that, what are you going to spend your time and what is your new passions going to be? And that is going to take a while to figure out. But I promise you, inside of a year, you are going to look and say, how did I ever have time to work and to do these other things that I enjoy doing? So, you know, finding that next passion, finding your next group of friends, people that you are going to do things with.
Once you have that in place, you will look back and say, I really, I really enjoy not having to wake up at 5 a.m. I really enjoy not having to do the half hour commute. I really enjoy not having the pressures and the demands of a full-time job. And that is one of the reasons that I talk about being thoughtful and deliberate about retiring early. It’s one of the main focuses of my website because I have just seen people that after they make the transition, they are surprised at how much they enjoy this new life. And in many ways, they regret that they did not make that decision earlier. So, I do not want that to happen to you or the people you know.
If you are in your 60s, one of the things I share is that 60 years old, we only have a thousand weeks of healthy, active time if we are lucky in front of us. And that is not a lot of time and it’s going to pass quickly. And unfortunately, for some of us, it’s going to pass more quickly than for others. And once those weeks are gone, it’s really hard to get them back to regain your health. So, you should think about making the transition. As I talked about earlier that fear of the unknown is one of the reasons that people do not take early retirement.
So above are two main surprises people are afraid of taking early retirement but later they wish they had transitioned earlier. The second reason is that people do not have enough knowledge. It is not that people do not have enough money as most of the people in their mid-50s or 60s have enough money for the rest of their life. Actually, its rather that people do not have a plan and they always think that they do not have enough money and retirement could be riskier. So this is one of the main reasons they do not take early retirement because they are unsure of their future and they keep on working for years and years and when they reach their full retirement its already too late.
Main reasons of not taking early Retirement
People tend to be fiscally conservative and when you think of the tool that a lot of planners use, which is called the Monte Carlo simulation, to try to predict, you know, whether you have enough money to retire or not. And really what we are doing is we are using statistical modeling to make up 10,000 or 1,000 different lives and say, in what percent of these outcomes do you not run out of money during a 30-35-year period? And you know, for most of us, we want to have a 95-97 percent certainty and people need to have as high of a certainty as possible. But you should remember, we’re running 1,000 different cases, or 10,000 different cases. Frankly, with today’s modern computers, it’s just as easy to run 10,000 simulated lifetimes as it is 1,000. So you know, in half of those cases, people that have three quarters of a million dollars or a million dollars and are spending 4% a year from that.
FAQs
Q. What is the best age to retire on Social Security?
A. The best age to retire is 62 years. At 62 years of age you can enjoy rest of your life as you have enough money to make your end meets.
Q. At what age do you get 100% of your Social Security?
A. The full retirement age is 66 but to be entitled for 100% of social security benefits you have to wait for one more year i.e. 67 years of age.
Q. What are the maximum Social Security Benefits?
A. The maximum social security benefits are 124% but you have to work till 70 years to age to get the maximum retirement benefits.