Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Yes, I recently heard that as well. The financial planning industry sells a retirement lifestyle of golfing every day, international travel, dinners out, and basically doing all the wonderful (and costly) thing you wanted to do while you were working.
But that's not the reality for most people. Sure, you're probably gonna have a couple nice vacations and maybe play a lot of golf when you're 63-72. But after that, most seniors gear down to really cheap lifestyles. They don't need to replace a car that sits in the garage most of the time. They're not going to Cancun or Spain every winter, they're doing sudukos, babysitting grandkids, and watching curling.
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Well that could be the sales pitch at some places, and it's the romanticized version. But I think that the industry actually talks about three stages of retirement: active, semi-active and passive. Any good advisor goes through that with their clients as retirement approaches and explains the three stages, what they can expect in terms of income and how that becomes relevant for their finances.
And yeah, you're quite right that costs like travel and cars decrease through the years. Other costs add up though and take up some of that cost, if not all. And in all honesty, a lot of people spend more in that first decade or 15 years annually than they did while they were working because they want to "front-load" their retirement. Travel and do things actively while they can, because as they approach that semi-active phase the trans-Atlantic flights and desire to do those things decreases quite substantially for a few reasons. Many people can no longer get insurance for travel, and of course some people can't travel medically. Still others have no desire to make that 7-9 hour flight in their 70's.