[Greg Reimer 7376]

Thought I'd add to the mix. I started a job that paid into a good pension plan in 1980. In 1986 I took another job somewhere else and took the funds with me and rolled them into my new job's plan, and worked there 30 years-1986 to 2016. I could see that it was time to think about leaving, the many perks we enjoyed one by one were being eliminated as time went on, and the clincher was that a bit of simple math revealed that my take home pension would slightly more than equal my wages. Also, subtract the cost of commuting, be it gas to/from work or parking and Metrolink train monthly passes, and it paid more for me to retire at 61 1/2. One true law of finance is simply that it's not how much you make, its how much you keep. I paid our house off some 20 or so years ago, I turned a 30 year loan into a 10 year loan by simply adding a few hundred a month to the payment each month, we don't buy cars by financing them, carry very little credit card balance, then about five years or so ago, I learned about Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University, and found out the factual things he recommended were things I had already been doing. Nobody will 'help' you with a loan unless they are getting a piece of the action, it's best to save, generate interest on the savings, and owe nothing in the process. Without a house note to pay, my wife went back, got her Master's degree and another Bachelor's degree, both my son and daughter got their Bachelor's and Master's degrees, and all three of them got teacher's credentials and are off and running. Wife still works, and she's wanting to call it off at the end of school a year from this June. I stay busy doing all kinds of things, I race, hike, we take short trips when we can, get out of here whenever we can, so far we've been healthy,God is good, and it's not hard to live within our means and save money as we go along.After next school year is up, we plan on taking more frequent trips and getting out more. One thing upon retiring, is a time of recuperation from the career years and their demands. It's an adjustment, but a welcome one. Just don't live outside your means. The scary thing about a sizeable nest egg is that the fools running the government would like to glom onto your stocks,bonds,CD's and anything else you have and not because they want you to have anything you worked for and saved up for. We need to be wise with what we have, be careful with any and all investing, don't listen to any investing schemes, because if something sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. Best wishes too all of you!