[scoreandmore]

I’m near that magic number age with a few million but I also have health issues and I’m terrified all of it will be spent on treatment because of how the USA is being governed into flames by the current corrupt administration. It never ends, when I was young and healthy I saved as hard as a could for my old age and didn’t vacation. Now I’m there and there’s zero guarantee of safety because of the rightward shift of politics in this country. Maybe you just have to say “fuck it” like gen z. Because being a paranoid gen x sure sucks.

[ryandrake]

Same here. I may be thinking about this wrong, but in my view, that "magic number" is a constantly increasing target, increasingly unapproachable. I once thought I could retire on $1M saved--at a 4% withdrawal rate, that's 40K per year... add social security and I could probably do it in a very low cost of living state. 5 more years later, when everything costs a little bit more, and my lifestyle inflated a little, I started thinking that the number I could safely retire with was $2M. A few more years of inflation and cost increases later, plus a kid that needs college, I started thinking I had to shoot for $5M in order to be safe. Some more years pass, more societal safety nets are burning down, and now I'm starting to feel the pangs of old age and potential health problems, I feel like that number is even larger and further out of reach....

[safety1st]

You can move to somewhere that has a lower cost of living. It's not unusual at all for people to move when they retire. There's a whole big amazing world out there and one of the best decisions I ever made was squeezing in enough travel when I was young, that it totally altered my mindset.

(That, and reading The 4 Hour Workweek. Once Tim Ferriss became famous, legions of people picked it apart and called him a bullshit artist. I took inspiration from that book, and went and lived it. 20 years after he published it I bumped into him completely by chance in a cafe in Phuket Thailand, which was an incredible moment, here were two guys, for decades just doing the thing that everyone had said was impossible or impractical, and we were two of the first to have the exact same idea and end up in the exact same place once Covid restrictions started to relax around the globe.)

I'll grant that kids significantly alter the numbers.