A lot of people assume that if you are a millionaire, you don't have to work any more and retire right away to live happily thereafter. Yes, we are all confused about who millionaires are and what does it mean to be wealthy like that. That is what I used to wonder myself when I was just a regular guy with just a few thousand dollars of savings in my bank account as a man in my late 20s.
Here is the reality, though. I am sure that many people who have no retirement savings or only a modest amount of tens of thousands of dollars or even low hundreds of thousands of dollars will say that I am one of those spoiled, rich people who should be happy to have so much money. To me that is beside the point. My reality is that my wife and I have a certain lifestyle, as modest as it is. We have just one car, 6 year old cell phones, we cook nearly all our meals at home, hardly any subscriptions, etc. We still end up spending close to a hundred thousand dollars each year living a middle class lifestyle in Massachusetts. Experts advise me that as we get older, we will need to spend even more on healthcare, on services like lawn care, snow removal, home maintenance, etc. So you can see that a million dollars does not go all that far. Even adding social security does not make a hell of a difference.
Finding the right retirement age
The simplest thing to remember is that the social security payments are highest if you start collecting them at 70. In other words, we have not made enough money yet to support ourselves for another 15 years. That is why our plan is to keep working hard till we reach 70 to maximize our social security payments. This will also allow us to save in other plans like 401(K) and IRA. Hopefully, at that time our monthly income will be substantial to support us so that we can pay someone to shovel the snow and fix the roof.