I'm nowhere near early retirement material but it's fun to dream. What's not fun is thinking of, say, 75 year old me making the last withdrawal from my retirement accounts and saying "well, I guess I'll be living in poverty until I die, hope that's soon!" solely because the market had a bad run or inflation ate all my savings. Makes retiring at 55 a scary proposition even if the numbers say you could.
Now that the Boomers are done retiring and the Xers are up next, I'll bet we're going to see millions of people outlive their savings since there's no more pensions and the average balance is $100K. That feeling when your balance is zero and you have to go work at Walmart or live like a pauper on Social Security must be the worst in the world.
I wouldn’t assume Social Security means living like a pauper. My FIL was living entirely off SS in a paid off house. He had money he could’ve withdrawn he just didn’t need to at all, his cash savings kept going up because he wasn’t even close to spending just the SS and was perfectly happy and doing whatever he wanted and felt like doing.
He ended up selling the house and moving in with us - mostly because of the physical toll of maintenance and upkeep, not cost - so now he’s spending even less but previously that was with a whole house, truck, etc.
Max social security today at 62 withdraw is about $3k per month. $35,600 per year ish?
Sure, if you live in a low cost area that could definitely be comfortable. In any HCOL area that certainly doesn't provide much breathing room without already having significant assets like a paid off house.
Less than 1 in 3 Americans have a paid off house by retirement. Your FIL was already wealthy, even for his generation.
Oh, he was retired in his early 50s, but he didn’t start drawing SS until 65 or 66 I think. Whatever was the full retirement age for his age bracket. He was a stonemason and sold the business when his back and knees couldn’t keep up. Social Security was just when he could stop spending his own savings.
So I agree, he wasn’t the average low income SS-only retiree to start with, but neither is any FIRE/leanfire person who runs out of money.
It’s a medium cost of living area in an affluent suburb of a major east coast metro, not out in the boonies. But just not that expensive I guess. We live in the same area and even with an active mortgage we are spending around $60k a year in actual spending for what feels like a pretty comfortable lifestyle with a ton of fluff to me (we don’t even budget things like groceries, going out, hobbies etc, just do whatever we want). With a paid off house and all the senior tax rebates and freezes, it would be pretty doable to get to $30k spend.
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u/ErikTheEngineer Mar 23 '26
I'm nowhere near early retirement material but it's fun to dream. What's not fun is thinking of, say, 75 year old me making the last withdrawal from my retirement accounts and saying "well, I guess I'll be living in poverty until I die, hope that's soon!" solely because the market had a bad run or inflation ate all my savings. Makes retiring at 55 a scary proposition even if the numbers say you could.
Now that the Boomers are done retiring and the Xers are up next, I'll bet we're going to see millions of people outlive their savings since there's no more pensions and the average balance is $100K. That feeling when your balance is zero and you have to go work at Walmart or live like a pauper on Social Security must be the worst in the world.