ian_bc_north Transferring principle assets is never a good idea as far as estate planning. You loose the stepped up value that happens with inheritance. Not to mention other legal issues that could come up. My ex mother in law gave my grandson 40 acres here in Ca. and insisted on doing it before she passed away, transferred it to his name, so now he has her base. If she would have willed it to him he would have gotten a stepped up value and would pay much less in capitol gains if he decides to sell it. And you must keep in the guidelines of the gift tax. Gift tax can come back to bite you if you give to much in any given year or over the life limits. My father is trying to reduce the amount of tax he is paying on interest income. He can give $12,000.00 a year to any one he wishes but go over that amount to any one person and the IRS want's to know about it. I am not totally clear on it but that's what the CPA told us. My father wanted to sell a small commercial property and give the money to us kids and was told it would effect his estate taxes if he gave each of us that kind of money all at once. My understanding is he can give me up to a million in his lifetime but if he dose it will be added back in the calculation for his total estate and would be taxed accordingly after his death. His plan is for us to pay as little as legally possible in estate taxes on the money he leaves us. The first $12,000.00 in any given year for any one person is exempt. As far as nasty fights over inheritance my father is not a fool and contrary to popular belief knows his children well. This is why he give me a detailed accounting each month. He has told me on several occasions he dose this to protect me later. Meaning he doesn't want me to have any hassles so everything is written in stone, in his handwriting, and his attorney is kept in the loop. I realize that in most families these thing are usually not talked about so openly or in my case so often. In some ways I am grateful I am so well informed and protected but sometimes it hits me like a tone of bricks. I don't think my father realizes the emotional toll it takes on me always talking about what will happen when he dies. It's been 3 years this month since my mother passed away and I really don't want to go there again. I hope he lives for another 100 years and takes all the money with him. That would be the best gift he could give me.

I retired in 2005. My last day of work was a Friday, the boss let me go an hour early as a final gift. Went home and felt nothing different on Saturday morning. I still had to run errands, clean house, and do everything else as usual. I was the first of "my crowd" to retire, so I had to find activities to keep busy- adult ed classes, sewing, visits to parks and beaches. One thing that never changed is, I still get up early, always before 7 am, like when I was working. I go out for breakfast coffee at a diner that opens at 7, I tend to get all my errands and shopping and housework done before noon, so my afternoons are pretty much free. My husband is severly disabled with MS (multiple sclerosis) so he needs a caretaker and chauffeur and that takes up a lot of my time. And the best thing is, I worked for 31 years in a busy public-contact government office and there was always a problem scheduling vacations and getting off work the Friday after US Thanksgiving, around Christmas,etc. Now I never have to ask for time off and risk getting turned down. It's all good.

As you can see from the posts above, there are specific issues to address when considering retirement. #1 is the physical: what will your health allow you to do, and for how long? Then what? Do you have a plan for coping with the inevitable aging? Do you have a backup plan for that plan? What happens if you can't drive for a short period, say for convalescence? #2 is the financial: have you done a budget? Are you free of excess debt? Have you reserved for large expenses: home maintenance such as a new roof or furnace, or the inevitable new/used car? How will you handle inflation if it goes above 5%? How long are you estimating your money will need to last (most people grossly underestimate how long they actually will live)? How much do you need to pay for healthcare - Medicare covers less than 65% overall of total elderly medical expenses, and nothing for vision, dental, hearing, or long term care. What do you spend most of your money on now? What do you propose to spend it on after retiring? We travel just around the West Coast, so yes, our costs have gone up. But we will not be able to do this forever, so now is our time to 'get up and go'. #3 is social/emotional: do you make friends easily? Do you have hobbies now or have you always focused on work and the co-workers around? Do you like spending time alone or are you willing to go out and make new friends? There is no right or wrong answer to these questions; but they can indicate what you may want to do with your time. ********** We retired at 55. All our friends/family are still working except for a few very wealthy friends and some who are much older and retired at the usual 65 age. So our weekends are still socially concentrated. We don't have a lot of friends, but that is our preference. We both have many hobbies and spend considerable time (and $$) every day on them. I don't do volunteer work, for example. I tried it before my spouse retired but didn't really enjoy it. Right now we have very full lives and I don't want the weekly commitment. But I'm willing to try it again at some future date, perhaps when our lives slow down a bit more. Retirement comes in phases because your health changes. Flexibility of mind is perhaps the biggest key to happiness. We are financially stable although certainly not rich (I wish, LOL), and able to afford living in a very expensive but beautiful area. Because my spouse did the "catch-up contributions" to his 401k for the last few years before retiring, we actually were living on a bit less than what our post-retirement income is. Although unintended, I now recommend this to people because it is really the best way to figure out if you can financially manage a retirement. In a three or four-year period you are going to experience 'bumps' that will show if you can manage on a specific amount. Once you are retired, there are no more performance bonuses coming in!

No, duluth, you're not the odd one out, but you're one of the sensible ones, LOL! DH and I were sloppy about a lot of things and didn't catch on until our mid to late 40s. We're fortunate things worked out but like you, there was a pension for DH that we could rely upon. Sadly, fewer and fewer have that option any longer. Anyway, it occurred to me I hadn't actually answered some of the OP's questions, so my bad. Here's my answers: 1) At what age do you hope to retire? I retired in 2006 at age 55. DH retired at the end of 2009 at age 56. I retired because I couldn't find a job within reasonable commute distance that was worth being away from home 10 hrs/daily, 5 days/wk. Salaries had dropped precipitiously (and remain low even now). I had job offers, but they would have involved a killer commute - using my car in SF Bay Area traffic for a 3-hr roundtrip would have essentially negated any extra salary above what was being offered around my home town. Had the money been really needed, I could have continued working for another 10 yrs, just with lower $$ expectations. I enjoyed what I did and met a lot of great people, many of whom I'm still in regular contact with. A large factor in my retiring was when my MIL moved in with us. We discovered our weekly visits had not shown us the real issue - a very gradual dementia. She is functional day to day, but there's no way she should live alone any longer. Because she shares household expenses with us, it makes up for what I would have netted from a full-time job. 2) Will you stay in your current home or move? We are staying put for now. We like where we live; we love our neighbors and they love us; it's convenient in location to our friends, family, and a wide range of attractions/activities. However, this is not a home for the disabled or elderly. It cannot be retrofitted at a reasonable cost. The area is all rolling hills and our property has a double slope, making gardening a real work-out! We have no sentimental attachment to a structure of wood, stucco and glass. It is a roof over our heads, it has served us well, it is extremely comfortable having been extensively remodeled. When the time comes that it's too much trouble to take care of, which I foresee coming in the next 5-10 yrs, we will gladly pack up and leave. We would like to live in a specific CCRC we've visited, but time will tell if it will work out financially. If not, we have sufficient assets to have other options for the next phases of our lives, whether together or singly. 3) What kind of investments or income sources will you have? DH has a defined benefit pension with 2% annual COLA and full medical at low cost (no vision or dental, though). His mid-range six-figure retirement account is our backup, we don't need to take distributions. We live a very comfortable lifestyle in an extremely expensive area, entirely on his pension. The last two years DH worked were a 'trial run' for budget purposes. He was contributing extra to his retirement account so we were living on the equivalent of what his estimated pension would be. So when he did retire, there were no surprises or shortfalls. I have three small pension/annuities from former employers that will start at age 65. I'm eligible for full SocSec at 66. These income sources will mitigate any inflationary pressures in future years. Because I have almost no retirement savings, I carry term life in the amount of $750K to ensure DH would have additional financial assets through my age 70, at which point the policy expires and we won't worry about how much more $$$ he needs should I predecease him. BTW, this is what I mean about properly assessing your own morbidity and mortality risks. DH suffered a stroke at age 50 and if he lives past 75 it will be a wonderful gift. But genetics are totally against him, so his odds are at best 50-50 to reach age 85 or order. My odds are about the same or slightly better. Both of us have family histories of diabetes and heart trouble. These are no longer the killers they were, but they are disablers. We have no children and relatively few family, even locally. Therefore, we each carry very good unlimited benefit LTC policies to cover facility care and home healthcare as we age. We have had these policies since our late 40's, and buying them was the smartest thing we ever did. Once DH had his stroke, he would never have qualified for anything affordable, even if I'd been able to find a carrier, for the next five years afterward. The total premiums we've paid for both policies over ten years, don't even equal six months in a good facility for only one of us. 4) Do you plan to work part time, or what kind of activities will you do? Retirement has been great. We sleep when we want, we eat when we're hungry, we don't have to dance to anyone else's tune, and we get to do errands mid-week/mid-day, when the check-out lines are shorter and sales clerks more relaxed. I garden and like to read (Amazon knows me SO WELL). I spend a lot of time on the PC as it's my lifeline: I shop, read, research, and communicate almost totally by computer. Every day I read three newspapers on-line: the local, the NY Times, and the WSJournal. Recently we went on a 5-week driving trip through the Pacific NW and I spent hundreds of hours on the PC researching every travel segment, hotel, restaurants, and attractions. Exhausting, but the trip was a huge success and it was worth the work. I set up a restaurant review blogsite last year. We dine out regularly and my reviews are fairly long, so this helps me keep them organized. This year I've set up a travel blogsite after our five 2010 trips. I'm not in love with blogging, but did this after being asked by friends to set up something on the web so they could access everything more easily. For 2011 I plan to revamp our garden website and that will be a huge undertaking. I have thousands of photos to winnow down and organize. DH is a media junkie. It isn't uncommon for him to have two TVs on and his three computers running simultaneously. All this while he does his hobby stuff (wargaming). Talk about multi-tasking, LOL! He's a sweetie, he'll do anything I want to do. A good partnership: I like to organize and he'll accompany me anywhere. We also like to walk, but he can walk further than I can so he sometimes takes himself off to hike alone in state parks. I'm an urban walker, I like to know there's people around if I need help. We both do yoga, but different types. His former boss occasionally gives him contract work, which is easy money but doesn't happen often.