This is my first time actually posting a question so please forgive me if I don't get it exactly right.
A little background: I retired 24 weeks ago at the age of 54. My husband will hopefully retire sometime after March 2021 from a state job at the age of 60 with a pension. We have just under 2 MIL, no debt, and although we will start using some of these funds until we reach Social Security ages (in approximately 7 years), by then, we should have about $110,000 a year to live on without touching our principal any longer (this will be a combination of how much our portfolio throws off a year, my husband's 2 small pensions for life, and our 2 Social Security checks).
For most of our 26 years together, we have been very diligent about our finances (saving accounts, retirement accounts, pension accounts (husband will have 2 separate pensions), investments accounts, etc.). Our families and friends joke with us all the time about how frugal we are, although they know we do everything we want to do and understand that our diligence has paid off by retiring earlier than most.
For most of our 26 years of preparing for retirement one day, we have invested in growth stocks (all DRIP Plans....Direct ReInvestment Plans). We hope to one day live off just the distributions. We both contributed to our ROTH accounts through our work and we both max out our personal ROTH accounts outside of work.
We recently took a chunk of my ROTH and sold the Growth assets and bought 6 Legacy/King Stocks. Even if the market should go down (and our portfolios as well), these 6 stocks should still continue to pay the same dividend, if not more (we only picked stocks that have either maintained or increased their dividends consistently for at least the last 25 years). By making this change, it will pay several thousand more a year than the way we originally held it. We're thinking of moving another chunk of my ROTH and doing the same thing but only after thoroughly researching several more stocks.
Since my husband and I are obviously retiring earlier than most, we're trying to move out of the very aggressive stance we've held for the past 20+ years and into a more conservative approach. My question, has anyone else done this or something similar to this? If so, how did it or how is it working for you? Does anyone agree or disagree with our approach? If not, would love to hear a different point of view or possibly why it may have not worked for you.
Thanks to anyone who took the time to read all the way to the end.
Submitted November 08, 2020 at 06:59PM by mdrigge https://ift.tt/2GKI4Jg
