At what age do you plan on retiring

[Legbiter]

Ideally I'd want to work in some capacity until the day I'd die. What I see is many men just utterly vegetate, rapidly, both mentally and physically after they retire.

[Tamas]

Ideally I'd want to work in some capacity until the day I'd die. What I see is many men just utterly vegetate, rapidly, both mentally and physically after they retire.

I think keeping yourself busy to some degree is the key. It doesn't have to be work-work, any hobby would do that requires some thought and effort (so watching TV doesn't count).

However, I don't think I'll be able to ever retire without a significant dent in living standards, so I am planning to roll off dead from some office chair in my mid-70s.

[Legbiter]

Given what I've seen and knowing myself I'd most likely revert to a lazy teen. 

[Malthus]

I'd do what I already do when I'm not working - draw my artwork.

I do wonder though if I'd be able to keep up enthusiasm for that, if drawing wasn't a blessed release from work ... so many people I know have all the free time in the world to do their art, but come up with a million excuses for procrastination.

[Habbaku]

I'm a Millennial, so my answer is nihilistic laughter.

Which is how I thought when I was younger.  This is why I was surprised to see that there are Millennials who are eating brown bananas and sharing Netflix passwords so that they can retire at age 40.  (Not that that is bad; it's just different than how things were in the Age of Grunge and Internet Millionaires.)

It's a pretty common attitude amongst other Millennials I know as well. Self-fulfilling prophecies are the worst.

[Malthus]

The problem is there is too much uncertainty.  I don't know how long I'll live, the future inflation rates, interest rates, performance of investment markets, etc.  Once I take the plunge, there is no going back.  Ideally I should have spent every last penny when I die.  But since I don't know when that will happen, it is preferable to die with money left, rather than to live the last years penniless. 

The official civil service retirement age is 60.  Retiring at 60 is the safest choice, but also causes the greatest amount of unhappiness.  I think my absolute limit is 55.  Maybe earlier.  Retiring between 48 and 55 is entirely possible, though the safety margin will be less.

If it's certainty you want, you could always plan your death to coincide with the money running out.

There was a Somerset Maugham short story that had this as the premise: a guy plans his dream early retirement on a Med. Island paradise at age 40. Only problem: not enough money to go past age 65. So, he buys a shotgun and plans to live only to 65, then shoot himself.

This goes splendidly, until he reaches 65 ... only problem is that 25 years of pleasure have weakened his resolve. So he dithers and puts it off. His credit is excellent, so for a while he just borrows, but eventually that runs out ... he gets kicked out of his house ... sells all his possessions. Eventually, his old landlord takes pity on him, lets him live free in a chicken shed out back. 

Edit: it's called The Lotus Eater:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotus_Eater

The story begins in 1913 with the narrator's visit to a friend on the island of Capri in Italy. The friend introduces the narrator to Thomas Wilson, who had come to the island for a holiday sixteen years earlier. A year after that holiday, Wilson had given up his job in London as a bank manager to live a life of simplicity and enjoyment in a small cottage on Capri. Enchanted by the island during his visit, he had made the decision during the intervening year to forgo working another twelve or thirteen years for his pension and instead to take his accumulated savings and purchase at once an annuity that would allow him to live simply on Capri for twenty-five years. And what will happen at the end of that twenty-five years, fifteen of which have already passed, asks the narrator; many men die by sixty, but many do not. Wilson does not directly answer the question, but he implies that if nature does not carry him off by the age of sixty, he will be content to dispatch himself, having lived a life of his own choosing in the meantime. The narrator of the story is stunned by such a bold plan, all the more because Wilson has the appearance and manner of an unremarkable, ordinary man – very much that of the bank manager he once was.

The narrator soon leaves Capri, and, what with the intervening world war and other events, nearly forgets his acquaintance with Wilson until thirteen years later, when he revisits his friend on Capri. By then, of course, the ten years that remained of Wilson's bargain with fate have expired. His friend describes for the narrator what has happened in his absence.

Wilson, his annuity exhausted, had first sold all that he owned; then he had relied on his excellent credit to borrow sums of the islanders to sustain himself; but at the end of a year after the expiration of his annuity, he could no longer even borrow. Wilson then had shut himself in his cottage and lit a charcoal fire to fill the room with carbon monoxide in an attempt to kill himself. But he lacked the will, the narrator says, to make a good-enough job of the attempt, and survived, though with brain damage that left him mentally abnormal but not unbalanced enough for the asylum. He lives out the remainder of his years in the woodshed of his peasant former landlord, carrying water and feeding the animals. As the narrator and his friend walk along, the friend nearing the end of the tale, the friend warns him to betray no sign of his knowledge of Wilson's presence; the confused and degraded man is crouching nearby behind a tree, like a hunted animal. After six years of this existence, he is found dead on the ground overlooking the beautiful Faraglioni (coastal stacks) that had enticed him to the island so many years before – slain perhaps, the narrator suggests, by their beauty.

The narrator had told Wilson shortly after meeting him that his own choice would have been the safe one: to work the additional dozen or more years that would have secured his pension and, thus, a guarantee of enough money to live on, however long that might be, before setting out for his idyll on Capri, even though, as Wilson said, the pleasures of a man in his thirties are different from those of a man in his fifties. But it is not to Wilson's original choice that the narrator attributes the tragedy of Wilson's final years; he applauds Wilson for having had the nerve to make of his life what he wanted instead of following society's approved path. The narrator speculates that Wilson might indeed have had the kind of resolve needed to carry out his decision to end his own life, if necessary, at the time he first enacted his bold plan to leave his workaday life in London for the full-time leisure that, Wilson had argued, is all anyone is working for anyway. But the very ease and indolence of his life on Capri had deprived him of the will he needed to carry out his decision when the time came. Without challenge, the narrator argues, human will grows flabby, just as muscles used to support one only on level ground will lose the capacity to climb a mountain.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Somerset Maugham also wrote this one on the same general theme :

https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/eng12/coursematerials/shortstories/Ant%20and%20grasshopper.pdf

[Maladict]

OK, so hiring an assassin to do the job for you is key.

[Valmy]

Is working really so horrible that we are now planning on how to commit suicide just so we can retire a bit earlier?

[Malthus]

Somerset Maugham also wrote this one on the same general theme :

https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/eng12/coursematerials/shortstories/Ant%20and%20grasshopper.pdf

I suspect "dying homeless" is the more likely outcome for the wastrel life than "having a rich widow will everything to you, then conveniently kick the bucket". But then, I'm not a charming early 20th century dandy, so what do I know? 

[Richard Hakluyt]

Somerset Maugham also wrote this one on the same general theme :

https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/eng12/coursematerials/shortstories/Ant%20and%20grasshopper.pdf

I suspect "dying homeless" is the more likely outcome for the wastrel life than "having a rich widow will everything to you, then conveniently kick the bucket". But then, I'm not a charming early 20th century dandy, so what do I know? 

Yes, true enough, but I totally agreed with him that the ant is annoying and sanctimonious; my sympathies were also always with the grasshopper 

[Savonarola]

Is working really so horrible that we are now planning on how to commit suicide just so we can retire a bit earlier?

You're looking at this all wrong; don't think of it as a problem:

OK, so hiring an assassin to do the job for you is key.

Think of it as a business opportunity.   

[Malthus]

Is working really so horrible that we are now planning on how to commit suicide just so we can retire a bit earlier?

You're looking at this all wrong; don't think of it as a problem:

OK, so hiring an assassin to do the job for you is key.

Think of it as a business opportunity.   

But what if the assassin wants to retire? 

[Savonarola]

Yes, true enough, but I totally agreed with him that the ant is annoying and sanctimonious; my sympathies were also always with the grasshopper 

That reminds me of one of my favorite sketches from The Muppet Show.

[Savonarola]

But what if the assassin wants to retire? 

We've got to keep up with the times; rather than staffing up with full time assassins, we'll use the power of the "Gig Economy."  Just punch in your desired location and time of departure and one of our gig assassins will be with you.  I'm thinking of calling this service "Auff."