- Joined
- Aug 5, 2015
- Messages
- 237
So I ask those who have recently left the work force . Do you have regrets ? Are you managing to eek out a living ? Hardships to be considered ? Pros and Cons ? I'm at the point where I'm pulling the trigger on SS . I know Jeff and Mike retired recently and I realize today is different than 5-10 years ago . Chime in please .
My advise is to NOT trust financial managers. I retired in 2008, so that is not recent, but before I retired I tested the waters. I tried three different financial management organizations. I put $100,000 in each of their hands and measured the results after 1 year. They all made money off of me, but the results for me were unacceptable. Fees canceled out any gains at one place. One firm put my money into money market funds that had no gain in value over the year, but reported supposed dividends paid by the investments. Bottom line was I had to pay taxes on dividends that I never got. One firm actually lost money over the year.
Friends of mine have had their life savings totally drained by financial managers. Now that was sad.
So I decided I would not let anyone manage my money. My advice is to ignore those financial advisors that invite you to the rubber chicken dinners and wow you with their supposed successes. They lie lie lie. They will tell you that you will be able to live on less money because you don't have to drive to work and buy work clothes and on and on.
We drive more that we did when working. All of our expenses have gone up since retiring. But because of years of saving, we have managed to not spend any of our savings. We live strictly off annuity, social security, interest, and dividends. But our income is more that when we were working because of good investments in dividend paying stocks.