littlebird wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2019 11:52 am The late 70’s person I am now is a very different one from the mid-40’s person I was at early retirement. Retirement is far from a static state. In fact, the changes that occur in old age are nearly of the same magnitude as the changes that occur in youth. Our (now my) finances are very different also.
I’m no longer thinking of possibly 40+ years of traveling, mountain biking and discovering new restaurants, with the potential of resuming work if our shoe-string finances go awry. Now, 31 years later, with my (much -older) late spouse’s long term care needs having been successfully met - with surprisingly little damage to our asset base - with travel and restaurants largely behind me, due to non-serious, but restricting health issues, my concerns are far different. Why would my asset allocation be the same?
Of course it isn’t. Early in retirement, our modest assets were in invested approximately 80/20, I also took advantage of serious dips to temporarily ”over-rebalance”. Later, I even took advantage of the drop in housing prices to buy a rental property and to buy a more -expensive -than -we needed primary home. I even had, and still have, a non-trivial allocation to high-yield bonds. That was then. Now, with only my own current comforts and potential long term care needs to consider, and with what I think are adequate assets to meet those needs ( probably due in large part to my somewhat aggressive earlier investing behaviors) and no particular unmet legacy wishes, my main goal is preservation. To this end, I would not be more aggressive than about 20/80. (In fact I am quite a bit less aggressive even than that right now, for reasons I consider unique to this particular era, and which cannot be discussed on this board.) The fixed income portion is more heavily in money market funds and CDs than bonds.
I’m not even spending my entire SS and annuity payment, but living very well in my ammenity-rich, but low cost “active senior community”. I even have no need to sell this now very overly large, but lovely home. My only financial wish right now is that there was some way - akin to investing in one’s own home- to both enjoy spending the money and yet having the potential for it still to be there when it’s needed.
Great post littlebird. My fave quote "I’m no longer thinking of possibly 40+ years of traveling, mountain biking and discovering new restaurants, with the potential of resuming work if our shoe-string finances go awry."xxd091 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2019 1:47 pm Great post littlebird -we are both now 73-bucket list of countries all done
Nothing medically serious happened yet but lots of intimations-teeth,wombs,backs and feet!
Plus lots of our friends have one partner heavily compromised re walking etc
Pulling in the horns-visiting children and grandchildren more often-“Timor mortis conturbat me”in the words of the poet!
Asset Allocation 30/70 -this will do to the finish
No complaints-had a great run-hopefully to go for many years yet but who knows(rather like the stock market!)
xxd091
I too retired young and am now 12 years into it. I have the perspective of life that it will head down a path not too dissimilar to yours. That is, while young I'll have different wants and desires than when I'm older. Even now I can see a difference in basic body health in 50s vs 30s. I'm sure it continues in that direction as we age. This is not to say we can't stay healthy and lead productive lives - just saying the body changes as we age. So too do our desires. So I set my AA to enable me to spend and live now which requires a different (more aggressive) AA while trying to accomplish these things. I realize as I age, my desire to mountain bike, travel extensively, and go to every new restaurant will wane. In fact, after 12 years of doing it and almost 90 countries later, it already has. Thus, I've begun to dial back my AA from what began at 80/20 and is now 65/35. I imagine eventually it'll get to 50/50. While I've attempted to live my life knowing how it'll go - it is comforting to hear my perspective is the correct one for me. Perhaps it's confirmation bias - but your post is the perspective I had on how it would likely go. So thanks for sharing it.