🕺 The Swingin' Sixties
FIRE BTC Issue #75 - Why "one more year" past 60 costs more than it pays
A New York Life survey covered by TIME found that nearly half of retirees between 62 and 70 wished they had retired earlier. On average, they wished they had left work about four years sooner.
That number stuck with me because it points to a choice many people drift into instead of making deliberately. They keep working because work still feels responsible, their portfolio could always be a little larger, and "one more year" sounds like the safe thing to do.
But after 60, one more year isn't just another year of income. It's another year of good health, another year of flexibility, another year of weekday mornings that could have belonged to you, and another year spent waiting for a level of certainty retirement planning will never give you.
If you're over 60 and still working because you think you need to, I want to help you look at your decision more clearly. Run it through three filters: your numbers, your health, and your actual portfolio. Don't let a generic rule of thumb, or the vague feeling that more is always safer, make it for you.
I also recorded a YouTube video on this same idea, walking through why "one more year" after 60 can be more expensive than it looks. If you prefer to watch, or want to share it with someone who's wrestling with the decision, you can check it out here:
🧮 One more year
The conventional advice is simple: work longer, save more, build a bigger margin of safety, and retire when it feels safe. Sometimes that advice is right.
After 60, though, the extra paycheck has to be weighed against the healthier years you're giving up.
Say you're 62, you spend around $80,000 a year, and you're thinking about working two more years for extra padding. On the surface, that sounds obvious. You get two more years of income, two more years of saving, and two fewer years of withdrawals.
However, the benefit from those extra years may be smaller than it looks. You may be earning at a higher tax rate than you'll face in retirement. You may be giving up lower-income years that could have been useful for Roth conversions or capital gains planning. Depending on your income and timing, you may also create Medicare premium ripple effects that don't show up when you only compare two more paychecks against two fewer years of withdrawals.
More importantly, the extra retirement income bought by those working years may be modest relative to the time you gave up. A lot of people look at the total portfolio balance and assume working longer paid off. The better question is what those specific years bought you.
If the answer is a slightly higher monthly withdrawal, a fatter buffer, and some psychological comfort, fine. But name what you're paying for it: fewer healthy years, fewer flexible mornings, and less time to enjoy the life you built. At some point, the extra paycheck isn't buying more freedom. It's buying reassurance, and you're paying for it with time you can't get back.
One more year also has a funny way of rolling forward. Markets feel shaky, inflation sticks around, maybe your bonus is coming, and there's always another reason to give work one more lap around the track. Then one becomes two, two becomes five, and suddenly you're in your late sixties still trying to buy certainty from a world that doesn't sell it.
The money side matters, obviously. But it isn't the whole story.
❤️🩹 Your early 60s aren't your early 70s
When people talk about retirement, they usually reduce it to a portfolio question: do you have enough, what withdrawal rate can you support, and how much cushion do you need?
Those are the right questions, but they're incomplete. Time, health, and energy belong in the retirement decision too.
Your early 60s are different from your early 70s. That should change the way you think about work. Those may be the years when you can still travel hard, walk 18 holes, hike without making the whole day about your knee, get on the floor with your grandkids, or take a long trip and enjoy it instead of recovering from it.
Health doesn't decline in a neat line. Sometimes it changes gradually, and sometimes it changes all at once. That uncertainty is exactly why the retirement decision can't be measured only by your ending portfolio balance.
The TIME piece on the New York Life survey points to a specific kind of regret. People weren't looking back and wishing they had spent more time at work. They wished they had taken more of those flexible, energetic years while they still had them.
Some people retire too early and create problems for themselves. I don't want to hand-wave that away. But financially responsible people often make the opposite mistake: they keep optimizing for safety after the biggest benefits of waiting are already behind them.
People are also more adaptable on the spending side than they think. If you retire a bit earlier than what feels financially optimal, you can make adjustments: trim spending for a while, push a purchase out, pick up some consulting, or change your travel plans. You can respond to a budget problem. What you can't do is get back lost years of good health.
Retiring a bit earlier than your retirement projection says is perfect can create a manageable downside. Retiring too late can create a permanent one.
📐 The 25x ruler may not fit your portfolio
If the 25x rule is too blunt for your portfolio, you may be staying at work longer than you need to.
Most retirement planning starts with the 4% rule. Take your annual spending, multiply by 25, and you have a rough retirement number. Spend $80,000 a year, and the simple version says you need about $2 million. Spend $100,000, and it says you need about $2.5 million.
That framework traces back to work like the Trinity study, which looked at historical stock and bond returns and asked a practical question: what withdrawal rate would have survived a 30-year retirement across different market periods?
For a traditional portfolio, 25x is a useful starting point. But it was built around traditional assets and traditional assumptions. Bitcoin is much more widely owned than it used to be, but plenty of people still run retirement projections as if bitcoin either doesn't count or has to be treated exactly like every other asset in their portfolio.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it.
Bitcoin has had a completely different return profile than stocks and bonds over its short-ish history. That doesn't mean I assume it compounds at insane rates forever. I don't. In my own planning, I use much more conservative long-term assumptions than bitcoin's historical CAGR.
But if part of your portfolio behaves differently, your retirement assumptions should at least make room for that difference.
That's why I built the FIRE BTC Compass in the first place. It lets you run your retirement number with your actual asset mix instead of forcing everything through a generic 60/40 lens.
