Greg made the coffee on Saturday morning, which is how I knew he was nervous. He makes coffee maybe twice a year. By eight o'clock we had the full pot, a yellow legal pad, my green notebook and the two statements we usually file without reading: his 401(k) and our savings account.
We had been circling this conversation since late March, when I found out I would lose my school health plan at the end of June if I left. I had already decided I wanted to leave. My knees had decided it before I did. But wanting and affording are two different things, and in twenty-six years of marriage we had never once put every number on one page.
What we actually have
Here is the page, more or less as Greg wrote it in his square capital letters:
- Greg's 401(k): $312,400
- Greg's IRA, opened in 2019 and mostly forgotten: $14,100
- My 457 account from the school years: $19,300
- Savings: $41,000, which includes what we think of as the emergency fund
- Mortgage balance: $24,180 at 3.5%, on track to end in the summer of 2027
Then the part that isn't a balance: my pension through SERS, the retirement system for Ohio's non-teaching school employees, after 24 years of service. I haven't read my estimate closely yet. That is next month's homework. Greg has no pension. His union job has the 401(k) and that's it.
Seeing $312,400 written out made Greg sit back. "That's more than I thought," he said. Then he did the math everybody does, divided it by twenty-five years, and got about $12,500 a year. "That's less than I thought."
What we actually spend
This is where the green notebook earned its keep. I have every bill since 2003, and the spreadsheet Emily set up for me makes the totals easy. Our average for 2024 was $5,180 a month. That includes the mortgage at $893, about $414 a month for escrow (property taxes and homeowners insurance), groceries, two vehicles, utilities, phones and the steady drip of kid expenses that I'll write about another day.
Take out the mortgage and the kid drip, and we got to roughly $4,100. That's the number we circled. It isn't a budget yet. It's a guess with a box around it.
The thing that scared me most wasn't on either statement. It was health insurance. If I leave in June, I go on Greg's plan, and his employer charges extra for a spouse who could have had coverage somewhere else. I'm still comparing that against a marketplace plan, and I'll write about how it comes out. Either way it is a new monthly bill in the same year my paycheck goes away.
Can I leave in June?
Greg's take-home pay runs about $4,440 a month. With the mortgage still there, we spend about $740 more than that. Without the mortgage, his pay alone nearly covers us. So the real question was the gap between June and whenever the house is paid off.
We decided three things before the coffee ran out.
First, I'll look for something part-time in the fall. Not a career, just a few hours a week doing what I'm good at, which is keeping other people's paperwork straight. Even $1,000 a month closes most of the gap.
Second, we're going to start paying extra on the mortgage in May and try to finish it in about a year instead of two. I'll report on that as it happens, including the months it doesn't go well.
Third, we don't touch Greg's 401(k). He plans to work until about 64, which gives that account six or seven more years to grow and gives us time to fix whatever we got wrong today.
A few things we couldn't answer went on a second page: how much my pension will be and when, what our Social Security statements actually say, what health insurance costs between Greg's last day and Medicare at 65, and how long the 2004 roof has left. That last one isn't a retirement question exactly, but it will come out of the same pot.
I want to be clear that none of this is advice. I'm a school secretary with a notebook, not a financial planner. If your numbers look anything like ours, the best thing you can do is sit down with someone who does this for a living. We plan to, once we know what questions to ask. This morning was about getting the questions on paper, and I'm a little proud we got that far without anyone raising their voice.
Greg's last line, while rinsing out the pot: "We'll see." In this house that usually means no. This time, I'm fairly sure, it meant yes.
