This is my first official post now that I have retired. While it is true I retired in April, I had more “pre-retirement” posts to write that didn’t get written until after I actually retired.

Since I worked part of this calendar year, we had to take that income into account when we were doing our retirement account distributions because that earned income counts toward our taxable income. In other words, we couldn’t distribute as much as we might have wanted to because if we exceeded the top of the tax bracket, that income would be taxed at the higher rate – at to us it isn’t worth it.

We worked with our Financial Advisor to make sure we reduced our risk tolerance going into retirement, and that we had some cash / safe money set aside to make sure if the market had an issue, we wouldn’t really have to worry about it. Wow, did we get that one right or what? (At the time of this writing, the market is down more than 20% since the beginning of the year.)

We have enough coming in to cover our expenses, and it turns out, we are actually “taking home” a little more now than we did when I was employed. So this affirms our posture of “why continue to work if we can ‘make more’ being retired?”

We do still have to watch what we spend because income isn’t infinite, but we do have a little more freedom now than before.

I’ll readdress the income aspect in the future as we get into the groove of the income-expense retirement cycle.