This is related to Teaching/Pensions: My husband is a teacher in a job he does not love (and increasingly dislikes). He has 11 more years to get to his full retirement (in his plan, this is currently 50% of his pay for life starting at his date of departure, which would be 54 yrs old, plus health insurance benefits at current teacher rates - this is all assuming they don’t gut the state of VA teacher's retirement plans). He would get a fraction of those benefits if he left now (something like $45K in a refundable account that he paid in and about $500/month starting at retirement age of 59.5, I assume?). I've found this info from doing some research on the state calculators, but unfortunately his school doesn’t know how to respond to our questions since I guess not a lot of people leave to stop working completely this early. Does anyone have experience with this? How did it work for you? Did you stay or did you leave? Another option he’s considering is to leave to work in a lower-stress state job with a lower salary for a few years and maybe to teach again right before retirement.
We are getting fairly well-prepared otherwise. We have jointly saved about $650K in a variety of retirement (ECAP, Roth, 457 and 403B), Vanguard, and an HSA and have a pretty good amount of equity in our house on top of that. I think we're pretty close to FI, but we’d have to move to a lower cost of living area if we decided to both completely separate from work. So, we’re likely going to continue work for a few more years to secure things a little better.
Any advice on the teaching front? My concerns are two-fold. One, my husband really is unhappy teaching and I think would like to go (but as is the case with many teachers I know, doesn't feel like he's qualified for other work, which he is, but that's another story) and two, I think we both have a really hard time leaving all that money on the table (something like $1M over the course of retirement).
I’m planning a separate post about the details of our financial plan, but haven’t quite put all that together. My question there centers around how to figure out how prepared we actually are. We’ve had a hard time finding a financial planner (or really anyone) who “gets” what we’re trying to do and agrees it’s feasible.
Thanks in advance!