It’s getting harder and harder for my younger wife to go to work when I don’t. Once again this morning she expressed her jealousy. She’s in that “practicing for retirement” stage, as work stress grows greater than achievement or promotion opportunities.  It happened to me when I was her age, but I had an advantage of a year-and-a-half earlier retirement age. I began to receive Social Security benefits at age 65 while she has to wait until 66 and 6 months. In addition, I have a life-long pension that kicked-in on my 65th birthday. She has more money saved than me, but she also has very aggressive travel and living plans. 

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately discussing how harmful to our health the last ten years of work can be. There are too many people that apparently work themselves to death, putting career aspirations over longevity. My wife has been diagnosed as having had a “silent” heart attack at some point in the last few years. This could mean that she may have to sacrifice some of those travel plans for an early retirement. I had my incident about a year ago that involved a trip to the Emergency Room after experiencing dizziness during my morning run. It turned out to not be stroke related, but it was enough to scare me. My wife is feeling that same sense of frailness that comes with getting older. Too many people wait for higher Social Security benefits only to die two years later. 

If she began to take Social Security at age 63 she would lose about $650 per month when compared with working an additional three-and-a-half years. However, the income she would gain would require 148 months or 12.4 years to offset. At age 77 the additional years of work would eventually begin to pay off, at the expense of delaying the income. It’s the same decision that we all make in deferring benefits to age 70. If she waited that long, for example, it would be nearly $1000 more a month or $12,000 in bonus income annually. I decided not to wait until 70 because it was 5 years of lost income that would take at least 13.5 years to earn a pay off, and I would have be 78 years old. I was not willing to wait, even though it would be $144,000 extra if I lived to see 90 and $266,000 more if I held on to 100. Who can even say how long Social Security payments will continue? I’m not even sure if I’m up for another 15-20 years of life, and at that point, because of my pension, I’ll have more than enough to live a sedimentary life and will have seen most of the world. 

It’s my wife’s decision to make, even though I selfishly would like to continue our standard of living. Currently, my retirement stool sits on four legs: Social Security, Pension, 401k, and a working wife. This luxury is certainly not worth her going through job-related stress and unsatisfying career aspirations. She can use her retirement savings to pay for health insurance until Medicare is available in two years. That could be anywhere from $8000 to $20,000 depending on the coverage, and the equivalent of several travel experiences. She might be poorer but certainly happier than she is right now as a hard working wife with a stay-at-home husband. Plus, she’ll live longer and I won’t feel as guilty.