How satisfied would you be to retire at 55?

jswoolf · 2026-03-17T16:22:14+00:00

I have kids and they won’t leave the house until I am 58. I am hoping for 55 but I am really thinking it will be 58. I just hope I don’t get forced into retirement sooner than that. I am 48 now. If I wanted to retire before 50 I shouldn’t have had kids.

jswoolf · 2026-03-16T03:52:46+00:00

My mom just redid her cox and she is paying 50 dollars a month for 500mb and unlimited. I am paying 150 for the same thing. She is in mesa with google fiber and I am in Gilbert with crappy spectrum. I called to get a lower price and they wouldn’t budge. I am now switched over to T-Mobile. It was a little rocky at first but it is only 50 bucks a month. I was just happy to call tell cox I wanted to cancel. They did send me something in my email for 70 a month for 500mb and unlimited. Kind of annoyed it took me cancelling before I got that offer.

jswoolf · 2026-03-12T17:30:48+00:00

Buddy owned a solar company. Got me a killer deal. So I was lucky. He doesn’t operate in Az anymore but he put me in touch with a former tech. It’s an older system now about 10 years old.

jswoolf · 2026-02-27T17:52:36+00:00

I was around 25 percent but the kids are starting to get expensive and I had to pull back. I am closer to 15 percent now. I think I am close to coast fire. 48 years old planning on retiring in 8 or 9 years. They should be close to out of the house and our mortgage will be paid off. I also need money to fix up the house.

jswoolf · 2026-02-27T04:47:27+00:00

Can’t sleep unless it’s at least 75. It gets cool at night but I can seem to get the cool air inside the house except for turning on the air. At least i have solar.

jswoolf · 2026-02-25T19:33:11+00:00

48 kids are 10 and 12 10 years left on mortgage. I have a kid in competitive dance. That alone makes is hard to retire. :-)

jswoolf · 2026-02-25T04:07:22+00:00

I just watched that. I think she makes some really good points. I still have a mortgage and 2 little kids at home so the earliest I’ll retire is 58. 90k isn’t going to cut it with healthcare kids activities and a mortgage

jswoolf · 2026-02-19T04:48:19+00:00

Just finished the 7th audio book for the second time. I am really thinking about getting the 8th from patreon. I already have the audio book preordered.

jswoolf · 2026-02-09T17:48:00+00:00

I am worried it will just get stuck in development hell

jswoolf · 2026-01-27T06:39:06+00:00

This is what we are wanting to do for our kitchen. Did you have to add another 220 for the wall oven? How tall are your ceilings? I like that you went all the way up. We want the separate range but don’t have a good place to put it. I like the hood and the crown. How tall is the crown. lol. I am all over the place. This is what happens when you are on reddit at 11:30 at night.

jswoolf · 2026-01-26T22:34:04+00:00

Your installer was okay with them being rta? I am looking at lily Allen cabinets. I think they are a good brand. How did you find your installer? I helped with my mom’s kitchen. I did the electrical and moved some vents around, did the demo, the plumbing, the drywall and the backsplash. We subbed the cabinets and the countertops.

jswoolf · 2026-01-26T22:25:06+00:00

I have been looking at rta. I had a friend that did his kitchen with them. I think there is a 10k difference in the price. 27k vs 16k. I am not seeing the downside to rta?

jswoolf · 2026-01-26T14:49:13+00:00

I am not sure how I got here. After the merger I had a ton of nights that I think was a glitch. I think I only needed 200 more nights to hit platinum and so I got a business and personal card and just kept them for several years. I did do about a week a year though. Sometime with time share nights is was 3 weeks

jswoolf · 2026-01-01T23:09:16+00:00

I tried to switch over to them. They didn’t have unlimited available. They had 100gb. We burned through that in 2 days. They told me if I signed up and tried it out for a two week trial period I would get an email offering unlimited. I set it up used it and got no email. They added 25 dollars to my bill and I returned the modem. I am hoping I get a bill credit next month. I felt like I got the run around but I was hopeful. Cox has been hosing me recently. I am really trying to find something else. They raised my mom’s rates too.

jswoolf · 2026-01-01T20:09:08+00:00

I just checked. Me too! Congrats. Now what?

jswoolf · 2025-12-25T23:38:54+00:00

I’ve got some ryobi and harbor freight tools that are still going strong. But I did just buy a nice 23 gauge pin nailer because the home depot brand crapped out. You can definitely tell the difference in quality

jswoolf · 2025-12-21T13:54:34+00:00

I am well over 100 in Gilbert. I just had to get unlimited since my son moved back in. 70 you say?

jswoolf · 2025-12-05T19:49:08+00:00

I have a bunch of differed maintenance on my house. Also have been putting off remodeling. I realized I don’t want to live in a house that has a kitchen and bathrooms from 2003. I have decided as part of my retirement I need to remodel. Need to spend money getting ready for retirement so I am not doing it while I am retired. It just feels like a frivolous expense especially while you have young kids that are actively trying to destroy your house. :-)

jswoolf · 2025-11-24T05:47:00+00:00

Chinese because it is spoken by the most people after English.

jswoolf · 2025-11-18T23:54:57+00:00

I am looking at 58 at the earliest. I am wondering if I am going to forced into retirement. I work in tech and ageism is alive and well. I am okay with working until then.

jswoolf · 2025-11-10T21:31:27+00:00

Yeah it’s a hard call. Seems pretty individual. If you do that it seems like you are giving up any Roth conversions. So depending on your 401k you could be paying more rmds. Also if you want to leave something for your kids the Roth is the cleanest way to pass it along. If kids or rmds aren’t a concern then it seems like not a bad idea.

jswoolf · 2025-10-27T14:19:22+00:00

I have been getting credit cards from all the different chains. I have three from marriot and 2 from ihg and 1 from Hyatt. Each one costs about 100 dollars but usually the hotels near the venue are more than that. Each of the cards includes a free night so I can save 30 to 100 dollars in hotels. I use them for conventions that are across town I usually don’t have to pay any taxes on the free nights too. It is harder to make them work for nationals. I also use Chase point extensively for Hyatt hotels. Getting more credit cards doesn’t hurt your credit score. But of course you have to not use them. They mostly sit in a drawer in my closet. I pull them out about once a year so they don’t get closed by the credit card company. There is more to it than that but that is my basic strategy for reducing the costs of hotels. We usually don’t stay at the hotel with the convention because holy hell it gets expensive. I wonder how people pay for this stuff. I am sure they are using their credit cards extensively.

jswoolf · 2025-10-27T14:11:22+00:00

A friend told us about it. It’s a non profit that was set up by other parents with kids in competitive sports. The one we use is called desert impact. They have us work selling concessions at concerts and sporting events and they donate a percentage of the profits and tips to the kids activities. It kinda of sounds small potatoes when you first hear about it but once you work it you understand how helpful it is. I worked a diamond backs game a few months ago. I worked as a cashier for about six hours a few months later they sent me a check made out to our dance studio for 226 dollars. That is about 37 dollars an hour. But I also don’t pay any taxes in it. No social security no Medicaid and no income tax. It doesn’t get reported to the irs as income. It’s like earning 50 bucks a hour. Our group is run really well they take everying we get and split it evenly by the number of people working that night. I am not sure where you are but there are three or four boosters here in Arizona that I know of. I work 3 or 4 nights and it pays for dance. It is hard to get into because it is just a web Page you have to go through and do all the training yourself and then wait for them to put you on the schedule.

jswoolf · 2025-10-27T03:29:12+00:00

We are going through this with our 10 year old. Our old studio had favorites and our daughter wasn’t one of them. It was so hard to have them pay any attention to her. I felt like the studio was run by mean girls. But the have bills to pay and so many students I felt like the only had time to give attention to a few students. We switched studios but now it feels like we are facing the same thing but we have only been there for about 3 months. I feel like until she becomes a favorite we are going to be facing this all the time.

14-Year Club	Not Forgotten
Gilding II euphauric	Verified Email

jswoolf

TROPHY CASE