Husband is mid-50s, works full time; I’m late 40s and “retired”. We live in a high cost of living area and got in late to the housing market, so it’s unlikely that we could live here forever unless dh works until he’s 70 so we could get the house paid off.
We have enough savings so that dh could retire today if we wanted to live quite modestly, but dh enjoys his career. We’ve been talking about it for a few months – I was hoping he’d retire early in 2-3 years, but he’s pretty sure he wants to work at least another 5 years. We’d want to move to a lower COL area, and also somewhere that fits our lifestyle choice (love of the outdoors & mountains) better.
The problem we’re wrestling with now is that dh’s job location is somewhat flexible. We could actually move now to a lower COL area and he could continue to work at his current job. (MTA: our choices for where to move are very geographically limited for him to keep his job) Here are the choices we are considering:
1. Stay where we are, keep paying the relatively high mortgage and other costs of living (we still save a very high % of his income in retirement accounts), hopefully enjoy continued appreciation of the house for 5+ years, then move to our dream location with a lower COL at that time.
2. Move now. The new location would be lower cost of living and dh could keep working at his current pay. So not only could more $ could go into savings, but we could probably have a house paid off within 10 years. The new location would be nice, but is not on our list of “dream” locations, so there’s the question of whether we’d want to uproot and move again (which I hate doing). So this only solves half our problem, really. Also, in a LCOL area, might we be giving up the large home appreciation that can happen in HCOL areas? (no, I haven’t forgotten 2007; I know appreciation isn’t guaranteed).
It doesn’t help that we drove out to the new potential location this weekend to check it out, and stumbled upon an amazing open house. We were stunned when we walked out of it; dh said, “That’s what I always imagined our home would look like.” It’s not our dream location but certainly our dream home.
So, what else should we be considering in this decision?