Tyler0215 wrote:
If you retire now you will not be eligible for SS benefits for several years. I think you need to take a careful, realistic look at the cost of fulltiming. I hate to throw cold water on your plans , but if you can't afford to stay in the house you now own you are on pretty shaky financial ground.
This isn't necessarily true. We couldn't have afforded retiring if we stayed in our house. Just utilities, state income tax, and property tax ate up $1300/month. And, we lived in an area where the cost of living was 154 percent of the national average (100 percent). We could have moved just about anywhere in the country and lived comfortably on less. We decided (at 47) to live on the road for a while.
It has been 2.5 years and we are loving our lifestyle. Those years spent doing what we want where we want instead of what we had to do to live where we were are priceless. And, though our 'income' is less than half what it was (and no social security) while working, we have the same amount of 'disposable' income to do what we want. We save a lot of money on vacations we no longer have to take - we spent about $10K a year - escaping our previous lifestyle.
Make sure full timing is what you both want to do. Put together a realistic plan. Execute it. Save the profit from selling your house for a future house. If it were me, I wouldn't jump back into home/condo ownership immediately; you may find in a couple years you want to live somewhere else.
Good luck and best wishes for your future!
