Lor and I were talking the other day about retirement, again. It’s a process, but one thing we do know is that we don’t want to be working two years from now. One thing about retirement is that to make it work, most of us have to change our spending habits and will be on more of a fixed budget. The largest expenditure for anyone is housing. The bad news, if you’re retiring, is housing continues to go up and up. This is of course good if you’re young and trying to build wealth but makes things harder when you move to a fixed income. For us, it means we need to downsize in what we spend on a home. That doesn’t mean in the size of our house, but in the cost. Size wise though, we can go down a bit on the actual home, but I want to go up on the lot size. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
First up is we need to lock down the location. All the metrics say Montana, and being specific, looking at everything from airport access to health care to weather and taxes, northern Montana in particular. Then you have to set a budget as to retire, we need to buy a house for cash, so we have no mortgage. To do this, we could spend around $2 million dollars, but Lori and I have decided to look for something ideally around $1,25 million. Luckily, there are a lot of nice, newer construction places in our range, 3200 square feet or so with 5 acres. We won’t be on the water, (would love to be on a river) as it’s not possible in that price range. That’s ok though, as you can see water from a lot of places and Marty has a place on the lake with a boat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, the search with these new parameters is on. Every decision we make now is based on retiring in a couple years. I’m looking at trading in my 3\/4-ton pickup for a nice highway cruiser like the Lexus LX700 or the Mercedes GLS 450. It’s hard to pass the deal on the Mercedes as I have the dealer offering me $16,000 off of a $96,000 car. That’s like a 15% discount which is almost unheard of. Then if I want a truck, Chevy will give me zero percent for 60 months on any half ton truck plus $10,000 off. Not sure if I can swing both, but that would be the way to go. I’m working up a budget now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’re also cleaning out the house and the garage. This means our closets, basement, and stuff we’ve stored for years. We dumped a bunch of tv subscriptions we didn’t even know we had. We’re upping the contributions to Lori’s retirement fund and fixing up little things around the house. We’d like to put it on the market in the Spring, depending on how the market is. Thankfully our neighborhood has held steady and hasn’t dropped in value. I’d like for things to get better by Spring as then I think we’d walk away with $2 to 3 million or more when we sell. That’d go a long way. Spring will be here before we know it. Time to get busy and stick to our plan. More to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ty’s off to work. We might go to the dump after the gym. Nice and clear up here. Lori’s two little fawns show up daily and she’s feeding them and their moms apples. You’re not supposed to really feed wildlife, but the moms are pretty skinny. The biggest thing is we fill the bird bath daily with water. All the animals love that! Time to get moving, have a great Saturday and God Bless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lor and I were talking the other day about retirement, again. It’s a process, but one thing we do know is that we don’t want to be working two years from now. One thing about retirement is that to make … Continue reading