Enoughness
A lot of times, when I think about the concept of having “enough,” I think about time. Or togetherness. As in, not having enough time with the kids.
But we’re doing a lot of financial planning/updating documents right now, so I’ve been thinking about enough as in having enough money or the opposite, feeling like you’ve worked enough years and are ready for retirement. If you don’t have a retirement date attached to your job, you need to figure it out yourself. And those two ideas: having enough money and having had enough of work sometimes go hand-in-hand, but sometimes you want to continue work for other reasons, such as purpose or interest.
I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of not working. I know I could fill my time in other ways, but I like working. I like that structure. I’m not sure how I’ll know when I’ve had enough of that structure.
And financial planning is such a strange idea because you’re planning for a complete unknown. When you’re saving up for a purchase, you know the amount you’ll need, you know how close you are to having enough, and you know what you need to do to get more. But when you’re saving for retirement, you’re saving without an idea of how much you’ll need beyond a general ballpark range.
Like you can theorize that X will be the smallest amount you’ll need if nothing changes in terms of interest rates or the market or social security or your health or your home. And you can theorize that Y is well beyond what you could ever need. But the number in between those two numbers is so enormous that it makes it impossible to plan.
How do you not know you’re not going to need a little bit more? And if you do, how do you know you’ll be able to get it? The whole thing feels a little too loosey-goosey for my tastes.
3 comments
I mean, there’s the whole what if I have to buy a visa or citizenship in another country either for myself or for my children angle. And the cost of buying freedom may go up once we get a little farther into the “First they came for” poem.
I opted for retirement because I could not stand my immediate supervisor any more, and her boss was a snake who blamed all her morale problems on me. I wasn’t embarrassed by being disciplined for things that really should never have resulted in discipline and I shared that with everyone. She was used to people not wanting their mistakes known – when you encounter someone who stubbornly thinks that they may not have been 100% right, but they definitely weren’t as wrong as they were being portrayed…you run into a lack of shame. 😈
The financial issues were a side thing – 2 of my 4 revenue streams come from the feds, and that still makes me nervous. I have “enough” saved, I think. But it still makes me a little nervous that I’m only able to save half of what I used to when I was employed. And then I think…hey, stupid. You’re STILL saving, which means your expenses do not exceed your income. You’re fine. Then the kid comes along and says she wants to spend all *my* money on college (instead of money I saved for her from her dad’s Social Security) “because she will take care of me when she’s a doctor.” Not how that works, kid.
I don’t want to work in retirement. I will if I have to. But I don’t want to.
I retired at 55, after my severance package ran out. I had hoped to retire early but not THAT early! & I was worried about having “enough” too — especially since dh also lost his job a year before I did. I knew the odds of getting a job in my field at my age at the same salary I was getting (or better) was highly unlikely. What helped reassure me that yes, early retirement was do-able was a free session with a financial planner (part of dh’s severance package). I had to send him a lot of information about our financial situation and budgets before we met with him, and he was VERY reassuring that yes, this was entirely do-able. I would highly recommend it.