but if they didn't agree to feed you theirs in your old age, then it's too bad, you have to cook with what you have.
Explain how this 'assumption' is useful to me wanting to achieve my goal?
I agree making this post here was a mistake on my part - insulting me is one thing going after my kids another .......
OP, if you're still around, I think what we have here is a major difference in communication styles, not any kind of intentional insult.
You have made a number of significant sacrifices and faced hard circumstances in your life. Faced with all that, you've done very very well to keep your expenses low, help your kids, and get the house paid off and debt paid down. You are clearly an empathetic person, and so you would like some empathy from other people -- some appreciation of what you've done and how much you've achieved under the circumstances.
This board is not particularly good at empathy and feelings. ;-) It's not that people don't care -- they actually do care, very very much. But they think in terms of numbers and logic and spreadsheets and, perhaps most of all, optimizing everything. So when people read your story, you largely get two reactions:
1. "Here is what you can do" -- answering the question with mathematically-optimal, non-emotional choices, without paying attention to the emotional subtext. People may well appreciate how well you've done to get your house paid off, but you're asking what to do now, so they're focusing on that question instead of giving the pat on the back you'd like to hear for your prior achievements.
Or
2. "But -- but -- what she did isn't mathematically optimal! Must follow the numbers and get optimized ASAP!" Again, note the lack of focus on the emotional aspects. I think these are the responses that are putting you on the defensive, because you feel like people are insulting your life choices and efforts. But it's not an insult as much as it is a different reality, a different way of looking at the world. It's not even apples and oranges -- it's apples and purple. Different universes.
The conflict, of course, is that if you want to get as close as possible to your goal in 10 years, you
need to think in numbers and optimization, not feelings. Which, ironically, means that the people who you most need to listen to are the very people who you think are insulting you, because you very much need the insight they can provide from their entirely different perspective. So please, please try not to be hurt or insulted by how people say things, because you'll miss what you need most.
Since it seems like I was able to say some of the same stuff in a way that didn't get your back up to the same degree, I'm going to give some advice for more concrete actions.
First, figure out what retirement assets you actually have as of right now, and how those assets may be affected based on when you draw on them.
-- Pension: get info about the monthly payout you could get, when you're eligible to begin drawing, and whether you can get a larger payout by waiting until 65 or 70 or more to start drawing.
-- SS: if you have a spotty employment history, you may be better off with 50% of your husband's benefit (also note that if he passes before you, your benefit converts to the higher of yours or his -- so long-term, that is a great safety net). Spend some time with the SS website and figure out what you're looking at there.
-- What about your current DH? Are you two pooling retirement assets and planning as a team, or are you dividing expenses and each covering your own share? If the former, your analysis should really include his assets and liabilities, too.
-- What about your former DH? Are you entitled to any assets from the divorce (such as part of his pension)?
Second, track your expenses, if you're not doing so already. It's great that you're spending $18K/yr. But as noted above, that implies you have around $40K left to invest, not counting taxes (which should be low in your income bracket). I'm guessing you used that excess to pay down the debt and the house. But a lot of times, people think they're spending $X, but they're not paying attention to the "lumpy" costs, like new tires for the car, or gifts to the kids), and if they actually tracked their spending, they'd really see it's $X + Y.
Given your low investments/cash to date and short timeframe until retirement, you're not going to have $1M in investments at 65, so it's going to be critically important to delve into these details now to know precisely how much you actually need (and how much future kid support and other luxuries you can afford). In addition, I think that doing these things will also help with your need for security. When you have a big scary unknown out there (like, say, future medical expenses), it can balloon up into this giant beast in your head, and so to "feel" like you're protected against that, you have to make really conservative assumptions about future expenses (a/k/a "I need $60K/yr because medical expenses!"). Whereas when you actually delve into the research and put some facts together, that gives you real numbers to work from -- and those real numbers are usually smaller than you feared.
Fear thrives in ignorance. So go get the information you need to beat the giant beast back down to size. And not coincidentally, when you beat the fear beast back, that turns off your lizard brain fight-or-flight response, and thus gives the logical part of your brain the ability to function and thus make those kinds of numerically optimal decisions you need to. Which means the more research you put in, the better your decisions are likely to be, for more reasons than one.