Retirement: Cow Tipping and Bingo playing in the Sun

I went to see a Financial manager the other day because as obsessed as I am with the growth in my net worth, I am sick of managing my own finances and feeling like I need to keep up with the Morningstar Ratings of all the funds in my portfolio. Who has time for this crap? I want to pay someone to make me the monies. Rich is indifferent on the subject, but I know in the back of his head, he will be glad when I stop saying things like, "we're up 3% in the past six weeks" and other weekly outbursts when he is trying to watch his football.

I am right now in the interview stage, but the first woman I saw was quite impressive and seemed to be very goal oriented. She made me start thinking about things such as whether I would pay for college for my future children and would that include any schools or just state schools? When I told her that I would pay for Harvard if they get in, she did some quick calculations and estimated that two kids at Harvard starting in 20 years would set us back a total of $1.16 million for the four years. Holy mother of God.

Then we started talking about retirement. What 35 year old thinks much about retirement? So of course I came home and Rich and I mapped out our retirement plan, which includes living in Vermont for the summer and Florida (or some other warm place) for the winter. (Rich would be the king at one of those retirement communities... We call him the mayor of our neighborhood. He knows everyone, their pets, their life stories, the names of the plants in their yard, etc...) Rich wants to retire next year, but I dissuaded him. We do plan to retire early though. We plan to travel as much as humanly possible before athritis kicks in and my lack of calcium has me hunched over like the old creepy neighbor, Herbert, on the Family Guy.



I am shocked at how much we will have to save in order to live comfortably when we stop working. Millions of dollars. I come from a family where my father made me max out my 401k from the second I started working. Much of that stemmed from the fact that by the time I graduated high school, both my parents were not healthy and living off of disability. Had my father not saved 10% of every paycheck while he WAS working, the Kudesh family would have been in big trouble.

On the flip side of that is that I wish my parents knew they were not long for this world so that they could have spent the rest of their hard earned money.. traveled to more places, bought a second home, etc... Not like they lived poorly because they didnt at all.. I just wish they would have splurged at the end.

Oh well, at least I dont have to save for Parker and Murphy's college education.