Here’s our latest interview with a millionaire as we seek to learn from those who have grown their wealth to high heights.
If you’d like to be considered for an interview, drop me a note and we can chat about specifics.
This interview took place in October.
My questions are in bold italics and their responses follow in black.
Let’s get started…
OVERVIEW
How old are you (and spouse if applicable, plus how long you’ve been married)?
I am 51 and my wife is 62. We have been married for 26 years.
One of the things I hope to share with your readers are the special issues to consider when there is an age difference between spouses. Some are financial. Some are emotional.
Do you have kids/family (if so, how old are they)?
We have two children.
Our daughter is just out of college starting her career in an engineering field and our son is a junior in college studying computer science.
What area of the country do you live in (and urban or rural)?
We live in a suburb of a medium-sized midwestern city.
What is your current net worth?
Approximately $3.9 million.
What are the main assets that make up your net worth (stocks, real estate, business, home, retirement accounts, etc.) and any debt that offsets part of these?
- Retirement accounts: $2,100,000
- Taxable brokerage account: $800,000
- Cash: $450,000
- Home value: ~$525,000
- RV: $125,000 (This is the only item of personal property we include in our net worth calculation because we could sell it if we had to and, unlike a car, it is not a necessity we would need to replace.)
- Liabilities: -$75,000 in mortgage debt. (Yes, we could pay it off with all of that cash we have earning virtually no interest, but it will be paid off in about 4 years with our regular payments and the interest rate is pretty low.)
EARN
What is your job?
I’m an attorney. I’m a partner at a medium-sized firm. I practice in mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance.
My wife is, or was until recently, a primary care physician with a large hospital system.
We are in the middle of our transition into a semi-early retirement. My wife just retired (fully) in May of 2021. I will be transitioning to a part-time role in early 2022. It will likely be a semi-retirement as I don’t expect to be engaged on a daily basis.
We were blessed to be able to practice in two financially rewarding professions.
However, these jobs pose a lot of challenges and risks for people seeking financial independence. I hope to give some advice so other people can avoid those pitfalls.
What is your annual income?
It varied a lot over the years because we were both paid based on our productivity.
Over the past ten years, our combined income varied between $500,000 and $650,000. In the past couple of years, it has been around $575,000.
My income peaked at $375,000 about five years ago and more recently has been around $300,000. My wife’s annual income fluctuated between $200,000 and $275,000.
Right now, we are transitioning to retirement so our income is in flux. My wife retired completely in May of 2021, so our income this year will be around $400,000. Both of our pay is heavily weighted toward the first part of the year, so she collected more than half of her annual pay before her retirement.
I will transition to a part time role with much lower pay starting early 2022. I don’t know what my income will be in 2022.
Tell us about your income performance over time. What was the starting salary of your first job, how did it grow from there (and what you did to make it grow), and where are you now?
Even though there is a ten year age difference between my wife and me, we started our professional careers only three years apart. My wife spent several years working after college before deciding to go to medical school. We met when she was a resident and before I had decided to go to law school.
I worked in business before law school. My starting salary was $24,000 in 1992 and I started in a small town in the Midwest. While I started in a small town, it was a big national company and they moved me to New York after about a year. My salary doubled to $50,000. At first I thought that was all the money in the world, but I quickly realized that New York City’s higher cost of living ate up all of that and then some.
I worked for that company for a few years before I got married and decided to go to law school. We also knew we wanted to move to the Midwest to start a family, so I went to law school in the Midwest. My starting salary as a first year lawyer at a big firm in the Midwest was $90,000 in 1999. So, I felt like my decision really paid off financially.
My wife made $30,000 a year as a resident when we met. Her first full time job after residency paid $90,000 in New York.
The great thing for us was that when we moved back to the Midwest, she actually got a raise to $120,000, but our cost of living went down. We were actually able to save money while I went to law school. Needless to say, I am grateful my wife agreed to make the investment in my career.
Since we are just now transitioning to early retirement, I should mention my wife’s pension. It will be around $68,000 (no COLA) per year and she will start to collect it in three years, when she turns 65.
For a doctor, I think this is a rare benefit. However, she works for a large hospital system that still has a pension program. We feel very lucky.
The last time I looked, it would cost us over $1.0 million to buy an annuity that paid as much as her pension. I don’t count this in our net worth, but it is definitely a big part of our financial picture.
What tips do you have for others who want to grow their career-related income?
You have to invest in developing skills, whether it is technical skills, management skills or selling skills. For us, getting professional degrees paid off.
Unfortunately, the out of control increase in professional school tuition over the decades has changed that calculation for the current generation. Some of the young people we know starting out in our respective professions have over $250,000 in debt at graduation. That is a huge burden.
It is only manageable if everything goes right: you get a good job, you like that job, you don’t get fired or get sick, don’t get divorced, etc. If anything goes wrong in your professional or personal life, that debt can set you back years.
Because of this, we did not push our kids to follow our path. We are relieved that both of our children chose careers that don’t require expensive graduate degrees.
There are other ways to invest in yourself than formal graduate or professional training, including job training, networking, private certifications that build your skills, etc. The bottom line is that people with sought after skills will make more money than people who lack those skills. You have to spend time and money, especially when you are young, to develop yourself.
What’s your work-life balance look like?
Early on, it was terrible. I worked a lot of 70 and 80 hour weeks when our children were young. I missed a lot of time with them working very late and on weekends.
One night when my son was still a baby, I got home at two in the morning. As I was about to go to sleep, he started to cry. I went into his bedroom and held him and rocked him to sleep. I fell asleep in the rocking chair until my wife woke me up around six when it was time for us to go to work.
As I advanced and we became financially secure, my quality of life improved, partly because I realized that chasing every last dollar was not worth it. The past several years have been manageable, but you can’t control when a big “client emergency” will come up and you are expected to be available and ready at any time.
My wife’s work-life balance also started out badly. She would have to leave early several days a week to do hospital rounds, so she would often have 12 or 13 hour workdays. Over the years, she delegated hospital rounds to hospitalist specialists, then gradually cut back her hours. For more than the past ten years, she worked about thirty hours a week with Wednesdays off. She retired in May of 2021, so her work-life balance is great now!
Do you have any sources of income besides your career? If so, can you list them, give us a feel for how much you earn with each, and offer some insight into how you developed them?
No, we don’t.
We were very focused on our careers and did not develop side hustles. It just was not an option for us. Both of our employers prohibited moonlighting.
In any event, because we were both basically paid based on how much we produced for our employers, any side hustle we could have come up with would not have made enough money to justify the time and energy costs.
SAVE
What is your annual spending?
We downsized in early 2020, right before the Covid lockdowns and our spending has gone down, sort of.
Up until last year, we lived in a large house that was expensive to maintain and our annual spending was around $160,000. We always tried to be frugal and used budgets, but there seemed to be no end to the maintenance and upkeep of our house (more on that below).
Our spending right now is about $125,000 because downsizing reduced many of our housing related expenses. We aren’t pinching pennies though.
We bought an RV with some of the cash that our downsizing generated. This has been a dream for several years, so with Covid restricting other vacation options we were on the front end of the RV craze and bought our dream RV in June 2020 and then a Jeep to go along with it. We quickly realized that we wanted more time to spend travelling in it the RV, and that led us to some major life decisions about retiring.
What are the main categories (expenses) this spending breaks into?
This is a hard one to answer because we are transitioning from our working budget to our retirement budget.
Right now, we spend around $125,000 annually, which breaks down like this:
- Mortgage debt service: $20,000 (this will be paid off in four years)
- Home maintenance, insurance, taxes, etc.: $15,000
- Auto: $5,000 (This excludes the RV)
- Groceries: $10,000 (we like nice food and wine)
- Vacations: $10,000
- Utilities: $6,000
- Life insurance: $4,000
- Shopping / clothes: $5,000
- Health insurance / medical: $17,000
- RV / Recreation: $10,000 (A lot of this is for modifications of our RV and Jeep. I don’t expect it to continue at this level.)
- Entertainment: $2,500
- Pets: $2,000 (two dogs)
- Dining: $3,000
- Charity: $15,000
Much of this is going to change in near future as our mortgage payments and healthcare costs. Right now, we spend a lot on health insurance because we are paying through COBRA to my wife’s former employer. We always got our insurance from her employer and my law firm’s insurance would actually cost more than her employer’s COBRA.
When I quit working full time and go “of counsel” in 2022, my income will be so low that we’ll probably qualify for subsidies on the ACA health insurance exchange and our health insurance premiums will go down. Also, my wife will be eligible for Medicare in three years.
In a few years, the mortgage will be paid off. We also plan to scale back our charitable contributions and cancel our term life insurance policies.
Ultimately, I expect our spending to stay around $120,000 because we will increase our spending on vacations and “fun” as the mortgage is paid off and our insurance costs go down. (For those of you trying to back into our withdrawal rate, don’t forget the pension. Our withdrawal rate should be around 2% once you include the pension. Social Security will reduce our withdrawals even more.)
Note: I’m also excluding the last two years of our son’s college tuition, which is hefty, but will be paid for out of our savings.
Do you have a budget? If so, how do you implement it?
We’ve budgeted for years.
Annually, we made a budget and then we would monitor it monthly. I’m the budget monitor.
Honestly, we aren’t as rigid these days. I track our spending monthly, but don’t make an annual budget. We pretty much know where we spend our money.
We are spending a fair amount now on our new toys, the RV and the Jeep, but I don’t regret a penny of these expenses. We’ve saved for years so we can have some fun now.
The act of recording and reviewing your spending is maybe more value than budgeting. Once you really know in detail where your money is going, you can’t help but make better decisions.
What percentage of your gross income do you save and how has that changed over time?
We started out saving 10-15% of our gross. Frankly, we could have saved more. We got side-tracked by focusing on nice cars and a big house. Fortunately, we did not inflate our lifestyle much.
Over time as we got raises, paid off some modest student debt and realized that we didn’t need to have those trappings, we were able to increase our saving to 20-30% per year (gross).
Taxes took a huge portion of our income in our most recent years, so our after-taxes savings rate was actually closer to 40%. Our best year for saving, we socked away about 45% of our after-tax income.
On a before tax basis, over the past ten years our overall spending could be described as almost: “1/3, 1/3, 1/3” – Save third, pay a third in taxes and live off the other third (and that is after we maxed out retirement contributions). Another way to look at it is that for the past ten or more years, we almost lived on one salary.
People starting out in professional jobs need to understand that the tax code does not go easy on professional service income – especially if both spouses in a marriage are highly paid service professionals. I advised business owners for years about how to structure their businesses in a tax efficient manner, but those strategies are just not available if you earn your living as a W-2 employee.
What’s your best tip for saving (accumulating) money?
- Get out of debt and stay out of debt. Yes, it is impossible to buy a house in America for most people without a mortgage but pay it off much quicker than 30 years. Yes, student loans are a fact of life but pay them off as soon as you can. We haven’t had a car loan in over 15 years.
- Use every tax advantaged savings program available: 401ks, IRAs, 457b. Especially if you are in a high earning, dual career family.
- Invest the money you save. You can’t really become wealthy by just saving.
What’s your best tip for spending less money?
Two specific habits:
- Record what you spend.
- Ask whether your spending is making your life better.
As the saying goes, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. We’ve applied the measuring principal to our spending for most of our marriage.
It took us a while longer to ask whether our spending was really improving our life. Once we figured out both pieces, we were able to get our spending down and save more of our money.
What is your favorite thing to spend money on/your secret splurge?
We spent a lot of money on our RV and our Jeep. Paid cash for both and I don’t feel an ounce of regret. We have had and are going to have a lot of great experiences with these.
In comparison, my daily driver is an inexpensive compact car. There are first year lawyers in my firm that drive nicer cars (they haven’t learned about depreciation yet!).
We also spend money on nice food and wine. Nothing fancy, but quality ingredients that are healthy and enjoyable to joy to cook at home.
INVEST
What is your investment philosophy/plan?
While I’ve always invested a portion of our money, it took about fifteen years to develop a consistent strategy or philosophy.
It really started out as a combination of stock picking while also trying to be diversified. I was terrible. I told my wife that she should have fired me years ago and hired a real financial adviser.
Finally, about fifteen or twenty years ago, I learned about ETFs and index investing and developed our current philosophy of:
- Keep costs low (our average investment fees are .10%),
- Invest in the whole market, or segments of the market,
- Manage risk
- Avoid market timing
To clarify, all of our investments are in the form of liquid financial assets that trade on public markets: high quality stocks, ETFs and mutual funds.
We have never invested in real estate, alternative investments or private equity. I think my approach is a solid balance of greed and fear.
What has been your best investment?
First, marrying my wife. Having a good marriage is the best source of wealth – financially and otherwise.
Second, raising our kids to be independent adults. So many of our colleagues have been burdened with adult children that can’t live on their own and require financial support into their twenties and thirties.
Third, getting my law degree. Law school was expensive and law is a demanding field, but it paid off for me. As I mention above, if I were starting out today, I don’t know if I would make the same choice.
Our best financial investment, owning broad market ETFs or index funds.
What has been your worst investment?
Our last house. In twelve years, it did not appreciate in value.
We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on updates and remodels and it cost us an arm and a leg to carry for twelve years.
What’s been your overall return?
About 8% for our investment portfolio.
I viewed that as mediocre, but recently read that this is better than the average for college endowment managers over the past ten years.
We’ve never been “all in” equities, so for our asset allocation this is not bad.
How often do you monitor/review your portfolio?
I look at our accounts at least once a week just out of habit. On a quarterly basis I break it down in detail to look at our asset allocation, investment costs and income from our investments. This has given me a very detailed understanding of our financial situation.
It is extremely important to look at costs and income. Find the management fees of every ETF and mutual fund you own and compare them to other products. You also need to understand what your 401k plan is costing you (it’s not free!).
As a result, our total investment costs now run around .10%. I also know how much income our portfolio generates to the dollar, which is very important for retirement planning. We aren’t chasing income, but our diversified portfolio produces about 1.8%.
Also, five years ago I put together a summary of our finances and our financial strategy that I update every year. It is our “in case of death, break glass” file. It has all of the information that my wife would need to manage our accounts if I get hit by a bus: passwords, account names, an explanation of our strategy, contact information for our estate planning attorney and recommendations for financial advisors. Every couple should one of these documents in an envelope in a fireproof safe or safe deposit box.
NET WORTH
How did you accumulate your net worth?
Most of it came from “ESI.”
I recently estimated that about half of our wealth was generated by saving and half from returns on investment.
What would you say is your greatest strength in the ESI wealth-building model (Earn, Save or Invest) and why would you say it’s tops?
We had very high incomes.
If we had been better savers or investors we could have built up an even larger net worth, but a high income can make up for weakness in other areas.
What road bumps did you face along the way to becoming a millionaire and how did you handle them?
I started reading about investing when I was a teenager. In 1987, a distant relative passed away and left me about $2,000. I was a senior in high school and that was a lot of money. Instead of buying a car or clothes, I researched mutual funds at our local library, found a fund that seemed a good pick and sent them the entire amount. I thought I was a genius and figured by the time I was thirty that amount would compound into a nice nest egg. Score one for the forward thinking youngster!
That was in September of 1987. Well, a few weeks later, Black Friday wiped out about half the value of that fund. The fund never recovered. Eventually, when I was in my twenties, I got a check for about $200 when the fund liquidated.
I can’t believe I’ve stuck with investing over the years after that first experience, but it probably explains our low stock allocation over the years. I’ve stayed in the market, but for peace of mind, I’ve always had a higher allocation to bonds and cash. Over the years, that has cost me a lot of potential gain, but if our allocation had been more weighted to stocks, I probably would not have had the stomach to ride the market out.
The 2009 financial crisis was a big setback for us. While I did not sell at the low, I did not re-balance toward equities. As a result, our performance in the years after the Great Recession was very sub-par. That’s when I told my wife she should fire me and hire another adviser.
Ultimately, after a few years, I knuckled down, reallocated to equities and vowed to stick with that allocation no matter how much my emotions told me not to. In March 2020 I did not sell any equities due to the Covid panic, and we have ridden the stock market to its recent highs.
We also got side-tracked when we were younger trying to maintain a more expensive lifestyle than we needed. Luckily, it was nothing that could not be undone and really wasn’t extravagant.
What are you currently doing to maintain/grow your net worth?
Growing our net worth is not a priority for us at this point. We are currently switching from the accumulation phase to the draw down phase.
We have a large cash allocation which means that we will not need to sell any investments to fund our lifestyle during our early retirement.
Do you have a target net worth you are trying to attain?
About one year ago, we wrote in our annual financial update, that our goal was to have $3 million in investment assets and cash when we retired. We now have almost $3.5 million.
We beat our target by a nice margin – mostly due to the bull market that has prevailed since then.
How old were you when you made your first million and have you had any significant behavior shifts since then?
I was 44. My wife was 55.
It increased our focus on saving and growing our nest egg because we realized that financial independence was achievable within 10 years. We actually beat that goal by two years.
What money mistakes have you made along the way that others can learn from?
I’ve been too bearish and missed out on a lot of gains by under-allocating to stocks.
However, I’ve stayed in the market and resisted the urge to market time.
See my comments above about the Great Recession.
What advice do you have for ESI Money readers on how to become wealthy?
First of all, be grateful.
To be in a position where you can even contemplate this question, you are better off than most people. Both my wife and I started from very modest beginnings, but we benefitted from parents that instilled good values and modeled good behavior. We both benefited from mentors and good luck in our careers. Yes, we worked hard and made good decisions over the years, but most of all at this point, I am just grateful for the good people and good fortune we’ve had to help us out along the way.
I would offer some specific advice to young people starting out in one of the professions (doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, etc.). These all seem like lucrative professions, and they are. But income is not the same as wealth. If you spend too much money trying to look the part of the successful attorney, you will just be another highly paid working stiff – never truly wealthy yourself.
In the book The Millionaire Next Door, they call that “All hat, no cattle.” I realized that a lot of people I thought were financially successful, were really just living paycheck to paycheck, even if they were pretty big paychecks. Some of the richest people I’ve met, and they were VERY wealthy, lived in modest houses, drove plain cars and practiced “stealth wealth.”
Second, you face a lot of risks as a professional that you need to be aware of:
- You will likely be totally dependent on one source of income. Many professional jobs will either expressly prohibit moonlighting or will take up so much of your time that having a side income is too difficult. Don’t be fooled into thinking that doctors and lawyers are immune from lay offs or career trouble. Nothing could be further from the truth.
- Your student loans are a financial time bomb. Pay them off as soon as you can. Do not buy a luxury car when you get your first full time job. Do not buy the biggest house you think you can afford. Pay that debt off – quickly!
- It is very hard to shelter professional service income from taxes. You will pay a lot of taxes over the course of your career. Use any available legal means to reduce your tax burden: 401ks, qualified deferred compensation plans, non-qualified deferred comp plans, IRAs.
- Don’t get caught in trying to project the “image” of a successful professional, whatever that is. It’s not worth it. You won’t get clients or patients because of the car you drive or the size of your house. You will get patients and clients by being a skilled professional who knows how to treat people with respect.
- Learn about investments and money. Don’t just give up and hire an investment advisor, you need to understand this yourself. You’ll make mistakes, but constant saving and staying in the market make up for a lot of errors.
FUTURE
What are your plans for the future regarding lifestyle?
As I’ve mentioned throughout, we are on the cusp of our “early enough” retirement. Between my wife’s pension, our savings, and some limited income from my reduced law practice, we will be able to fund a very comfortable and enjoyable lifestyle.
Because of our age difference, she started thinking about his long before I did. It was only five or six years ago that I realized if I worked into my 60s, she would have spent a big chunk of her “golden years,” watching me continue to go into the office. Couples with an age difference need to consider these issues in their planning.
What are your retirement plans?
We are going to travel in our RV and spend a lot of time out of cellphone range.
At some point, we’ll do some international travel, but right now that doesn’t sound fun.
I will eventually get involved in some sort of productive activity. I don’t know exactly what that will be, whether it is some volunteer work for one of my passions or a lifestyle business that allows me to keep my mind sharp without crimping our schedule too much.
We are lucky to have the classic “3 legged stool” retirement plan: savings, pension and social security. We will draw down savings and have enough cash that we should not need to sell any securities for many years. My wife’s pension kicks in at age 65.
We used a couple of calculators to determine the best social security strategy, which appears to be my wife claiming at age 70 and me claiming at age 62. If you are in your fifties, I suggest getting an estimate of your social security payment from the Social Security Administration’s website. You’d be surprised how much it can be.
Are there any issues in retirement that concern you? If so, how are you planning to address them?
The part I’m most concerned about is not the money (which is a good position to be in). It’s finding some new challenge or activity that gives me meaning and a chance to work with like-minded people.
I have been blessed during my career to work with people that I generally enjoyed – both my colleagues and clients. Law is a demanding career and it can often impinge on your personal life, but it gives you a chance to work on challenging projects with talented people. I will miss that and hope to find some activity or cause that gives me the same sense of camaraderie, with more flexibility.
My wife just loves having time to engage in her hobbies and hopes to spend more time visiting her sisters and extended family in another state. She’s much more comfortable with downtime than I am! Her only worries are about money – and luckily we’ve solved those.
MISCELLANEOUS
How did you learn about finances and at what age did it “click”?
As I mention above, I’ve been reading about investment and money since my teens.
However, it took until my late thirties to learn about asset allocation and low cost investment vehicles.
Luckily, the mistakes of my youth did not totally derail us.
Who inspired you to excel in life? Who are your heroes?
My mom and dad.
They were the first in each of their families to finish college. They both earned graduate degrees after I was born. I grew up watching my mom go through school. She earned her Ed.D after I graduated from college.
Do you have any favorite money books you like/recommend? If so, can you share with us your top three and why you like them?
- The Millionaire Next Door, by Stanley and Danko. It was eye opening for me. It is especially important for young people entering one of the professions! It opened my eyes and made me realize that the habits that we saw our colleagues engage in were not things we should emulate. The big houses, expensive cars, private schools, financial support to grown children – these were all just wealth destroying habits practiced by people who felt like they had to present a prosperous appearance.
- Can I Retire Yet?, by Darrow Kirkpatrick. I know he’s a competitor, but I have to be honest. I came across his website seven years ago after a random web search on a financial topic. He was the gateway to early retirement planning for me. His book is just like his website, but more detailed. It’s the best summary I’ve come across and I don’t think you need to be financially sophisticated to understand his advice.
- Work Less, Live More by Robert Clyatt. I read this a few years ago and it opened my eyes to the fact that my identity does not have to be tied up in being a lawyer. That’s a big reason a lot of professionals never plan for retirement, they can’t imagine not having their professional identity. My wife was always more well-balanced and didn’t need a book to tell her that. She hasn’t missed work once since she retired.
Do you give to charity? Why or why not? If you do, what percent of time/money do you give?
We support our church and some causes that are important to us.
We’ve always given a steady amount. As a percentage of our total income, it was small – 3-4%.
We will scale the dollar amounts back now that our income is decreasing, but the percentage will probably go up.
I think it actually works out that we have averaged 10% of our total spending on charity and I think that will continue.
Do you plan to leave an inheritance for your heirs (how do you plan to distribute your wealth at your death)? What are your reasons behind this plan?
We hope our children won’t need an inheritance, but we intend to leave them something.
It’s an area where my wife and I differ. It’s important to her that we leave something to our two children. Much less so for me.
Beyond that, neither of us worried about “leaving a legacy.” We are giving to charity while we are alive and will leave a portion of any legacy to some charitable cause. We haven’t really thought about it as it is not our biggest priority. Our legacy is in the values we instilled in our children and the impact we had on our community.
ESI192 says
Congrats on all your success and upcoming retirement. I may have missed it, but how much did you and your wife have in student loans when you completed your studies?
Millionaire298 says
OP here. We were lucky. I had about $60k in debt from law school but my wife had no debt from medical school. Even luckier, I consolidated my loans and locked in an interest lower than 2% (in 1999). As I mentioned in my post, this is completely unrealistic in today’s world. The cost of professional educations have outpaced inflation for two decades. It’s just crazy.
Brian says
Congratulations on your FI and upcoming retirement. I am in my late 40s and start to think about retirement around your age. However, as I invested some much already into the career and the money/work is pretty favourable, I find it hard to cut the cord. Seeing friends/patients die around my age does present a different perspective.
You mentioned the emotional issues with an older spouse. Curious as what would those be? Do you think interest/hobbies changes as you guys age?
Millionaire298 says
OP here. Primarily, I was talking about the different feelings about work. It’s been harder for me to let go of work than my wife – because I’m in my early 50s and she’s in her early 60s. However, since I wrote this post for ESI (several months), I’ve been thinking about staying engaged with my firm on a part-time basis (after my sabbatical). So, I’ll get to do work I want with a flexible schedule. The money will be a fraction of what I was making as a partner, but I won’t have the stress I had with that and we’ll be free to travel and have fun pretty much whenever we want.
The Wealthy Weasel says
Well done!
I can relate to many of your scenarios mentioned! (DW is 5 years older…)
We lived a bit lavishly in our 40’s, but got things back on track in our 50’s.
Solid advice on Social Security. We started taking DW’s earlier (lower earner) and mine will be started later. Her’s goes directly into investments, at this point, but will provide a nice cushion when we finally go into decumulation.
MI 160 says
Great story and great lessons shared. Nice work.
Sask to AB says
Wonderful Post!!!
So appreciate your idea about your “in case of death, break glass” file.
My husband and I need to do that so the kids have all info in one place.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. All the best in your retirement.
Tom from MD says
Great interview! I am interested in the SocSec claiming strategy of her at 70 and you at 62. My wife is quite a bit older, too, and we have pretty much settled on her 70 (which is THIS YEAR – yikes!) and me 67 (my Full Retirement Age).
Any particular reason you’re thinking 62?
Finally – I hope you are on MMM. I would love to personally connect. It’s not many folks with an age difference like we have, especially with the wife being older. (My wife and I are actually farther apart than you and your wife – shocking, right? Hahaha!) I always tell her we are more “actuarily correct” if you assume men die at a younger age. 😉
dvJm236 says
My wife is also quite a bit older than me. I am on MMM so maybe we can all connect. Always good to compare notes when there is a wider age gap between spouses as there are unique things to consider.
Tom from MD says
I will look for you there!
Millionaire298 says
OP here. I based our current SS claiming strategy on a calculator (https://opensocialsecurity.com/). There are others out there. Maybe a different calculator would produce different results, but from what I’ve read, this is a common strategy for couples with an age difference . I’ll admit I don’t know all the ends and outs of it and our decision is not set in stone. I’ll probably revisit this annually with a couple of different calculators to see if anything has changed. Hope that answers your question!
Phillip says
“Also, five years ago I put together a summary of our finances and our financial strategy that I update every year. It is our “in case of death, break glass” file. It has all of the information that my wife would need to manage our accounts if I get hit by a bus: passwords, account names, an explanation of our strategy, contact information for our estate planning attorney and recommendations for financial advisors. Every couple should one of these documents in an envelope in a fireproof safe or safe deposit box.”
Worth repeating. Nobody like to talk about their death but this item, a will and medical directives are all essential, especially for those with spouses that don’t want to engage in family finances if they don’t have to. Some other blogger called it a “death file”. I have my similar docs on a memory stick and the file is password protected.
“My salary doubled to $50,000. At first I thought that was all the money in the world”
Reminded me of these lyrics …
“Fifty thou a year’ll buy a lot of beer”
Song by Timbuk 3
The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades
Gotta love the 80s.
dvjm236 says
Congrats on early retirement for your wife and your semi-retirement! Great interview!
Kevin says
Congrats. Great interview.
Any tips on raising our kids to be independent adults? We have 3 and I keep thinking about it a lot.
Thanks
Millionaire298 says
OP here. Sorry, nothing profound. The last thing I feel qualified to give advice on is parenting, but here are some basics. We always lived below our means, so our kids never felt rich. We never took glamorous vacations. We did not buy them fancy gifts or clothes. We made them both get jobs in high school. But at the end of the day, I think most of just boils down to their own personality.
I recommend the Millionaire Next Door for a great overall approach to raising kids with a good relationship to money and work.