Retirement is a highlight in one’s life. You work many years, and the goal is to retire in comfort and enjoy your remaining years. Retirement is one of the American dreams that can come true. It takes some planning and saving to reach the goal. Also, it takes a little luck for all the cards to fall in place so that Retirement can happen.

Since I retired eighteen years ago, I will share what I did to help me live comfortable in retirement. First, I made sure all my credit cards were paid off. The only balances I had in credit cards were monthly expenses and they were paid off totally every month. I inquired what my social security monthly amount would be, and the small pension amounts we would receive after retirement. Reviewed the condition of the vehicles seeing how many years they would last before replacement. Then, made a tentative budget seeing if our retirement income would cover the necessary expenses every month. Entertainment items such as trips and vacations would come out of savings. The decision was made to retire and hope our finances would last longer than us.

Everything was doing ok until the financial crash of 2008. At that time our portfolio showed unrealized losses to be over one half of our portfolio. The decision had to be made to sell the stocks and change the unrealized losses to realized losses. Since I didn’t need the money, I elected keep the stock until the value of the investment returned to the purchase price and then sell. We didn’t make any money, but we didn’t lose any either. It took about seven years to finally regain all our original investments. These were scary times, and the decision were made to pull out the stock market completely and just invest in secure investments. I was just becoming too old to live with that stress and insecurity. We have been ok financially since.

As you become older health issues tend to hamper retirement plans. The vacations and trips appear to be shelved because of health issues. We have had over eighteen years of comfortable retirement and feel very fortunate to have these years. Hopefully we will have many more.