Comment Already Retired (Score 4, Informative) 341
I retired about a month before my 62nd birthday. I delayed taking Social Security until my wife retired 2.5 years later; she delayed to a month after I started. Instead, we lived on our investments and her meager wages. She had to continue working so that we would have group health insurance through her employer. Then, we paid for continuing her health insurance via COBRA (about 6 months for me and 18 months for her). This was all per a set of spreadsheets that I developed to determine the optimum time to retire and how to finance it.
We are now in our early 70s. Our retirement investments continue to grow faster than we spend them. Until this year, we did not even spend all the dividends and interest. I expect that, by the end of this year, we will again have underspent our dividends and interest.
I manage our investments myself, relying on mutual funds. Of course, this means I am really relying on the managers of those mutual funds. However, the choice of which funds and how much to allocate to each is my own choice. For anyone interested in my investment philosophy, see my http://www.rossde.com/invest2r....
We have a very comfortable retirement. No, I was not a corporate executive, entertainer, professional athlete, or hedge fund operator. For my entire career, I either created or tested software, primarily for use by the U.S. military to operate its earth-orbiting space satellites. No, I did not work for the government; I worked for defense contractors. (See my http://www.rossde.com/retired.... for a brief history of my career.) Our retirement is successful because I understand investing and choose to be somewhat conservative (despite my liberal politics) in how I handle money that might have to last another 30 years (being from a family that is very long lived).