Time bomb

I've never given much thought to the age difference between my wife and I other than the fact that her being 8.5 year younger is a bonus. However, yesterday I decided to do a rare bit of retirement planning and some shocking realities dawned on me.

My life expectancy is supposedly 87 whereas hers is 90. This means she will outlive me by almost 12 years. My state retirement age is 67, hers is 68. This means that I will supposedly retire almost 10 years before her. The chance of me retiring early at 55 (a similar age to when my parents retired) is unlikely as both my children would still be in university at that time. In fact, my youngest would not leave university until I am almost 60.

Of course, this doesn't mean I'm about to go trade my wife for an older model but it leads me to draw a number of conclusions:

• If I wish to spend my retirement with my wife, we must have sufficient funds for her to retire at least 10 years early. 
• If I wish to retire early then this just magnifies the issue.
• If I do not have sufficient funds for both of us to retire early ( me by 7 - 12 years, her by 17 - 22 years !!) then I am unlikely to ever retire early.
• If I am unlikely to retire early, then a lot of things we planned to do in retirement we may not achieve due to my age at that time.
• The only way to mitigate these issues is to;
• a) Put aside a hell of a lot more money
• b) Try and maintain physical and mental health for as long as possible.

Of course even then it's not that straight-forward. To put aside more money we must either work more or spend less. This will have negative effects on our lives now. Maintaining health will not be an easy option either. Both my Dad and Grandad suffered heart problems and on top of this, when I broke my back the doctor warned me I am likely to suffer arthritis of the spine in later life.

#depressed