Probably fewer than you think. People are usually surprised by an early death, so they give it more weight in their minds than is justified by objective analysis.
Like if you are a relatively health 55 year old male in Canada, you might be thinking about retiring. Your chances of dying in the next few years are vanishingly small - much less than 1% per year. But if you die right after you retire then EVERYONE you know will make note of it and it will be prominent in their minds, maybe for years to come, specifically because it is so noteworthy. But if your 87 year old neighbor dies, well that’s just the way she goes. Sad, but he had a good life.
It is probably even more nuanced than that. Money doesn’t ensure happiness but on average it helps, a lack of money doesn’t ensure misery but on average it hurts. There are literally no A → B relationships here, despite the way these findings are presented on the news.
Most mega super rich people I know are not happy because they define themselves almost entirely by wealth and they see all relationships as transactional. Many are paranoid, they’re often very controlling of their kids, they don’t trust anyone. Lots of substance abuse.
But most high earning people I know who aren’t business owners seem pretty damn happy. They basically do whatever they want and value personal relationships a lot more than the people described above.
These discussions always take over threads because opinions about money/happiness are charged with emotion and personal opinions. Just a reminder that the Greater Good Science Center at Berkley continues to produce all kinds of wonderful evidence based information about the nature of happiness. I definitely encourage people to peruse that site regularly. It will make you happier and debunk a lot of widely held misconceptions about happiness.
Here’s an interesting recent (well, a year old) article on money and happiness that yet again unpacks the fascinating nuances of the relationship. Whatever it is that you think you know about this the research continues to produce complex and interesting findings that will surprise you.
$75k number was in 2010, that is $104k today after adjusting for inflation. Add in 1) not living in an expensive city and 2) confidence in your ability to continue earning $104k+/i.e. job security or plus skills to easily get a new job if needed, and I think the maxim is still true enough to live by.
My dad died at 50, my mom at 46. It isn’t FIRE, but I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking a year off in my 40s, calling it an unpaid Sabbatical. I’m not sure if it’ll be career suicide (pretty sure I’d have to leave my company), though I think I like learning enough I would spend the year working on some new skills that I never get to while working a full load.
Say I need to work 3 years longer to retire (I’m just making that ratio up) would I prefer the year at say 45 versus 3 years at 54-56.
imo the key to happiness is watching as many late 30s Cary Grant movies as you can
Relevant to the “relationships with differing views on retirement” is Holiday (Cukor 1938), where he plays a former poor turned rich via hard work who is about to marry into a wealthy family. His plan is to retire young now that he’s rich but his future wife disapproves. However, her unserious but fun older sister might feel different (she’s played by Katharine Hepburn which gives a hint on how this will end). Probably unhelpful for the situation of you guys with your wives, but great movie !
I feel like with the mega rich people, there’s also the aspect of many of them being second generation or later, meaning two things:
–They didn’t have to work for the $$, and like it or not, humans have primitive monkey brains that gain satisfaction from earning/accomplishing stuff. If that’s missing entirely from your life it fucks you up.
–Having never had to really overcome obstacles, there’s always that thought in the back of their minds that they may just find themselves unable to function if the $$ goes away, and there’s an intense paranoia about keeping/growing wealth so things stay easy.
Whats the deal with you guys planning on retiring in your early 50s. Are your jobs really terrible or are you just rich? Or both? Are there really lots of people doing this? What are you going to do for the next 30-40 years?
FWIW the only person I know personally who retired at 50 is my step father, but I’m 85% sure he just got fired for drinking on the job and wasn’t able to find anything else lol.
I’m pushing 52 and unfortunately in no position to retire because I haven’t saved for shit. But if I could I’d do it tomorrow, because yeah, it annoys me to no end having to go to work every day, even though my salary is probably top ten percentile for my education level and the job is only middling in terms of being difficult/soul-sucking.
I’ve always said I’m not one of those people who will ever enjoy getting up and going to work in the morning, even if my job is to play with puppies and taste test ice cream or something. Anything where you’re gonna make me go somewhere every day and do stuff, I’m gonna resent on some level. And damn straight I’d find plenty to do every day for the next 30 years.
I picked 66-70 but I only work half time now as an independent consultant. My wife is 8 years younger and it will probably take another 10 years to get anywhere near $3M which is the approx amount I think we will need for a comfortable retirement.
We are on pace to own the house outright about then.
Not bad considering I started over at age 40+ And had negative home equity as late as 2015 or so (bought my post divorce townhouse in 2005, bought this house on 3% down FHA). Got out from under townhouse and have about 200k in equity on this house now. Plus I married someone with big student loans that we will be done with in 2025.
A nice parting gift from my Dad is going to make it easier to get to the finish line. Have had very passive income outside of retirement accounts before now.
So the hope is to wait to max retirement age (70) and no retirement withdrawals until then as well.
Hopefully the genes hold up. My Dad was able to fly domestically until 91.
My wife and I are both objectively high earning professionals and we have healthy saving/investing habits. We are planning on “retiring” mid 50s but because that’s a decade away we don’t know for sure that it will happen. At this point “retirement” just means that if we stop earning employment income at that point in time we will be financially secure with the same lifestyle we have now.
I wouldn’t say that our jobs are “terrible” but they are time consuming and carry a certain amount of stress (for me) and LOTS of stress (for her - being a health care professional in 2023 means you have days that make you cry). There’s a possibility that for us early “retirement” actually means just relinquishing our relatively demanding leadership roles and working 2 or 3 days a week for while is less demanding roles.
Even if we stop working completely I don’t think we’ll have trouble filling time. My wife is already a sought after mentor for younger doctors, she’d have no problem at all doing that on a larger scale in retirement and that would be extremely rewarding (non-financially). I am easily entertained, I could literally do nothing but play chess poorly and watch Rangers hockey and relax. Also if I do a “clean break” in retirement and just work full time up to Retirement Day - 1 and then have no work at all on Retirement Day, I am 99% sure that on Retirement Day + 1 I am getting a puppy and the next decade of my life will be 24/7 Best Buds Time and I will be probably as happy as I’ve ever been.
Yeah, we touched on this before in another thread. It’s really important (IMO) to realize that you can glean a lot of understanding and wisdom about the nature of happiness without actually pinning down a universally accepted formal defintion.
Having said that, there is a broad approach that is at the center of all the good research on this topic.
This One Neat Trick of simply characterizing happiness in broad strokes as “feeling positive generally and about life overall” just leads to all kinds of insights. Because if you are then diligent in your experiments and data collection and processes, you end up finding out what types of behaviors and practices and approaches lead to people feeling better generally. Is that “really happiness”? Maybe, maybe not, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. The “correct” formal definition of happiness is the LEAST useful part of all the work to derive evidence based insights into the nature of happiness. I recommend spending approximately 0% of your time worrying about whether science has come up with a satisfactory definition of the word and lots of your time understanding their findings and what it means about daily living.
The whole “parting gift” thing is the wildcard in the equation for us. My parents are both Silent Generation folks who worked professional jobs and have nice pensions, along with diligent saving and a not particularly lavish lifestyle. Dad turns 92 this year and Mom turns 80, although she’s in much worse health than him. Obviously I’d love for them to be healthy and happy until they’re into triple digits, but just statistically speaking, there’s likely gonna be an inheritance in the next 5 years or so.
Of course that’s never anything we’re remotely including in our planning, partly because it’s gross and morbid to count on or anticipate, and partly because end of life care can wipe out an enormous chunk of what they have. Which is why I still answered the poll as 66-70 because that’s the very earliest we’d be able to retire with just our own savings. But depending on the situation that could change by a decade or more.
That’s how we were. My Mom’s mom had a series of small strokes starting her 70s and was in a nursing home for a few years, more or less out of it. It was a big fear for both (both nursing home and losing their faculties).
Mom spent zero days in a nursing home, I think 2-3 overnights for procedures. She had one final procedure to try and get her heart functioning normal. She passed the next day.
Dad spent a week In January in hospital/stroke rehab and then about 10 days total in hospital/rehab/nursing in June. Hated every minute. Checked out, so to speak, a few nights in. He was on the path to be being significantly impacted mentally so he would have taken what happened 100/100 times.
Other than that they lived off dividends a small pension and social security. I’d love to be able to do the same. But it’s effing scary. My brother made a lot less than me but worked for a city government so has a very nice pension and retiree medical plan.
Many problems that are insurmountable when you’re broke become trivial when you have money. And those sorts of problems can rapidly snowball into worse problems. But if you have enough money, poof, they’re gone.