It’s been a few years since I’ve addressed this question. Back in 2021, my wife was passed over for military promotion for around the 7th time. This is actually normal, as you have to put in the years to climb the ladder. Nonetheless, it was demoralizing. It felt like it was time to give up and live off of the military pension, savings, rental properties, and my side hustles of blogging, dog sitting, and some other stuff.
Then, she got promoted, and things got easier. She loved her new job and was happy to work there. Now that President Musk and his goons are running around destroying the government, things are very different. Their goal is to make the government a toxic workplace. They aren’t even trying to make it a secret.
It reminds me of this Seinfeld episode, but trying to get everyone out of work:
The irony is that George was not doing any work. There’s an impression that this isn’t happening with government workers, but it couldn’t be more wrong. In my experience, they do 3x the work of the private sector with 1/2 the resources.
Now the question is real, let’s dig into:
Can My Wife Retire?
The short answer answer is “YES!” That was the answer in 2021, so it’s not surprising that it hasn’t changed.
The more important question is, “Can We Live the Same Life if My Retires?” When experts do their retirement calculations, they almost always base it on your current lifestyle. They don’t factor in a bare-bones eating-cat-food-to-survive situation.
When I started this blog in 2006, it was with the idea that I’d explore ideas on how I could retire early. My main motivation was that my wife would be eligible for her military pension at age 44. I didn’t want to have to work another 21 years after her.
Life takes a lot of turns in nearly 20 years. I transitioned from my software engineering career to self-employment more than 15 years ago. Our entire financial dynamic has changed greatly since we only started dating when I started this blog. At age 49, we’re now 5 years past the finish line of that original goal. We’ve added liabilities in that time. They are commonly called “children.” That has required some changes along the way.
Can We Live the Same Life if My Retires?
I’ve always claimed that retiring early is about cash flow. Traditionally, people create a big nest and spend it down over time. I never liked the idea of having a “burn rate.” When I started my career as a software engineer around 2000, that term was used to describe a lot of internet companies. It didn’t end well for almost all of them (RIP: Pets.com sock puppet).
We have a big nest egg, but most of the money is in retirement accounts that we can’t easily access for another 11 years when we are 59.5. There are some ways we can get at the money, which is worth exploring, but I’ll save that for another day.
So, getting back to cash flow, the idea is to have more income than expenses. If that works out, then we can almost confidently say, “My Wife Can Retire, and we can live the same life.” It’s almost impossible to guarantee either income or expenses. Things change over time. I’ve seen my blogging income fade away while my dog boarding income has grown. We can overestimate expenses and underestimate income to create a margin of safety.
Expenses
Four years ago, I wrote an article that details our expenses for the next five years.
We have two big financial events coming up in 2-3 years. My kids go to a private school now, but they’ll be moving on to public high school (I hope) in 3 years. We get a military discount that makes it half-price. However, we have two kids. Five years ago, it was around $25,000. Now, they have moved up to middle school, which is more expensive. Inflation has been tough as well. The price now is around $37,000 a year. Summer camps are close to around $6,000. Add in some after-school stuff, and I’ll round this up to $45,000.
My wife wants to do a private high school for them, but I don’t see a way to make it work. It’s much more expensive, and we won’t get any military discount if my wife retires. They’d have to get some kind of merit scholarship, I imagine. My town is building a new public high school, so I believe we should send them there. We’re already paying for it through our property taxes. So this annual expanse of around $40,000 should go away. I’m expecting that camps could get cheaper because maybe they’ll get jobs.
Our house has a little more than two years left on the mortgage. That’s about $35,000 per year that will go away. Phew, dropping $75,000 in expenses is going to feel good. We have a rental property that will be paid off in around two years, too. That’s income, but it’s part of the two big financial events.
I’m just going to estimate our other expenses using the old table. I could look up the numbers, but I’m going to be “Lazy” on this one.
- Transportation – I had transportation at $3000 because we had our cars paid off. Now we have repair bills, and it’s probably closer to $8,000 – ouch! Our cars are 10-12 years old, so we’ll need new ones – perhaps when the mortgage is paid off.
- Food – I had $16,000 in 2021, with half being groceries and half being restaurants. I’ll keep this at $16,000. There’s more inflation now, but we eat out less, and I’m on a cheap generic GLP-1 so I don’t eat as much.
- Healthcare – I had this at $1000, but let’s bump it up to $3000 to account for the above GLP-1 and costs to regrow hair. I don’t know what our healthcare plan will cost when my wife retires, but typically TriCARE for Life is cheap.
- Misc – I added another $15,000 for this area that can cover a bunch of basic stuff that I forgot. My wife writes the landscaping check, for example. I’ll bump this up to $20,000 now due to inflation.
Housing and education at at $80,000. The other four areas above add up to $47,000. In the spirit of rounding up, let’s call it $130,000. Phew, we are spending a lot of money, and it’s not counting the money we are spending on vacations or fixing up the house.
In three years, that drops to around $65,000, which is a much more manageable number. My side hustles can almost pay for that.
Income
Just like our expenses will drop a lot in 2-3 years, our income will jump at about the same time. I mentioned the rental properties above, and it seems like we should expect around $20,000 in income from them.
Here’s what the rest of our income looks like:
Income from my Work
I have this blog, dog sitting, some regular freelance work, and equity ownership in a small company that pays out monthly profit-sharing checks. The combination of these is about $80,000 a year.
I wouldn’t count on any money from the blog going forward. The dog boarding income seems to be steady and resilient as long as there isn’t another COVID. The small company is still chugging along, but I get the feeling that I shouldn’t rely on it forever.
I’m going to assume that I can make at least $40,000 from some set of businesses that I don’t have to work too hard at.
Income from my Wife
My wife’s military pension looks like it’s $110,000 if she retires now. It’s a fairly straightforward calculation, given her rank and years of service. This was a lot more than I expected. I just ran it through ChatGPT, and it confirmed that my calculations are accurate.
My wife could do other things to make an income in addition to that pension. However, she’s going to take a well-deserved break for as long as she damn well pleases – LOL. I support that 100%. However, I feel that at some point, she’ll want to do something. She’s been toying with writing a book. I won’t expect anything other than the pension.
There are some expenses for pension insurance (if she dies, the pension will be transferred to me). So, realistically, it would probably be closer to $90,000
Combined, my wife and I would make $130,000 a year in the long term. Her pension is indexed for inflation, so we wouldn’t have to work about that. In the short term, we’d make $170,000 since my side hustles are still making $80,000.
Final Cash Flow Analysis
It looks like my wife can retire, and we can live much of the same life. The numbers are very close, though. We’ll spend about $130,000 for the next three years and make around $170,000. We have to account for taxes, so it’s probably going to be very close.
After three years, our expenses drop to around $65,000, and we’ll be up to around $190,000 with the rental properties. That would give us a lot of extra money – at least until the kids go to college. We have my wife’s GI bill and some savings to help with that. I’m hoping they get some scholarships since we are paying so much to build a strong foundation now.
The Big Nest Egg
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that, ideally, our income would cover our expenses, and we could even maintain our cash flow.
We have investments that we can tap into. One regular brokerage account makes about $7,000 in dividends a year. We’re reinvesting them now, but maybe we can use that cash if she retires. We could also draw down the account using the 4% rule to extend that to $10,000.
Our retirement accounts have enough money where we could withdraw 4% of $75,000 of annual income. Once again, I’m too Lazy to calculate what the early withdrawal penalties would be if we tapped into it now. We don’t plan on doing that, so I’m not going to consider that scenario. More likely, we’ll get to 59.5 in 11 years and start withdrawing then. My math estimates that we’d be able to withdraw $150,000 using the 4% rule because it should continue to compound.
Final Thoughts
Things are moving along nicely. When I did this exercise four years ago, everything seemed to be close. It’s still a little close, but my wife’s pension went up a lot when she made O-6. That’s helped offset a lot of the inflation.
I’m sure you noticed that a lot of this is an estimation. I might get more serious with specific numbers as President Musk continues to clear out the government and forces my wife to make a decision.
The post Can My Wife Retire? (2025 Edition) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.
Source
Author : Lazy Man