By Dave Dineen
Should you reduce your lifestyle in retirement? Not necessarily. Take the time to discover the lifestyle that’s right for you.
Why reducing your lifestyle in retirement is not always the solution
If you’re planning for retirement, you may think you’ll need to move into a smaller home. But what looks adequate on paper may not work so well in real life. Depending on your needs, reducing your lifestyle may not be the best solution for you, and you may need to revise your plans. That’s what happened to us.
I discovered a significant obstacle to my early retirement several years ago: half of our net worth was tied up in bricks and concrete and could not be used to generate investment income.
Retirement is approaching; we sell the house… to buy back or rent?
Are you continuing to work after retirement age: a good financial choice?
We, therefore, embarked on a complicated adventure, spread over several years, to ensure that we would have a beautiful home and a pleasant lifestyle when we retire:
We sold our four-bedroom house. Our family home, abandoned by the children, was too big for two people. A lot of our money was tied up in coins we never used.
We purchased a 71 square meter condominium with one bedroom. Its downtown location was perfect: 250 meters from work, with parking, close to the best public transport service and the best delicatessen in town on the ground floor. We could walk to our doctor’s or dentist’s appointments and the shops, and we were only 500 meters from a large regional hospital.
We did something unusual. As the condominium was too small to accommodate the family, we demolished our family chalet dating from the 1950s and built a three-bedroom house, winterized. This new “cottage” has become the place for our big family reunions. We rented it out in the high season, which provided rental income.
All of these measures have freed up some money to invest, increased our income and significantly changed our real estate and our way of life.
Retirement: the secret to a successful transition
Retirement, or the time to indulge your passions
The problems arise
That was a good arrangement. But after a year or two of working and living like this, we discovered that two problems were more complex than we had thought:
The chalet was expensive, and its maintenance was complex. Property taxes on properties bordering the lake were increasing significantly. In addition, although the chalet was new, it required more care than we had anticipated. The to-do and pay lists were longer than we wanted.
We could not travel at our ease. While we had to cut grass, pull weeds and prune trees, we missed trips to distant destinations.
