No. of Recommendations: 4
Most real life retirees don't take 4% ... it's more like 2% at age 65.
I don't believe that. I think that this survey was looking (perhaps unintentionally) at an atypical subset of 65 year old retirees.
intercst, you are in a VERY non-typical situation. You keep making the mistake of thinking that you are more typical than not.
"After a while you get to the point where you realize that the real luxury in retirement isn't the wealth. It's the fact that there's nothing you have to do and nobody you have to report to."
...
I still wouldn't mind working part time at home or if the office was close (15 minutes). That would depend on my health and while I feel good,
When I retired from Motorola I had been working on a flaw in the Network Time Protocol software program (ntpd on Linux), having to do with skewing the local time at startup in an obscure initial status after a power failure.
I deeply lived the NTP source code and the fixes for several weeks and was 90% finished when I left, and planned to complete it as soon as we settled down in our new location.
As few weeks later after we were all moved in and set up, I fired up the editor to make the final fixes and testing .... and discovered that I had exactly 0.00% interest in it. This was something that I swore up and down that I would finish, because our Motorola system badly needed it.
Interest in ANY kind of work dropped to zero. And I retired from a job that I loved almost as much as my wife.
As for filling time in retirement, a lot of the retirees around here play golf several times a week. I discovered thriftbooks.com and torrents, and now have more books and movies than I will finish in my lifetime.
All of this only happens, of course, when you retire with enough income and savings.
If we had another $500K or $1M nothing would change for us. We already have done as many cruises and travels as we want. The only place that we haven't seen is Antarctica - because my wife says it is too cold and she won't go.
Like many, the only IRA withdrawals we make are the RMD. Our kids will get a windfall when we finally croak.
