I’m 60, Just Paid Off My $1 Million Home And Have $750k In Retirement Savings — Can I Retire Now?

The post I’m 60, Just Paid Off My $1 Million Home and Have $750K in Retirement Savings — Can I Retire Now? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

At 60, with no mortgage and $750,000 in the bank, you’ve accomplished what many Americans never will. The question is whether the math works for a retirement lasting 30 years or more.

Whether it works or unravels within a decade comes down to four specific pressure points worth examining closely.

What $750,000 Actually Buys You at 60

1. Age: 60, targeting immediate retirement
2. Home: Paid off, valued at $1 million, a major asset but not liquid income
3. Retirement savings: $750,000 in tax-deferred accounts (assumed traditional IRA/401k)
4. Social Security: Not yet claimable at full benefit; earliest claiming at 62 yields a permanently reduced benefit
5. Core risk: A 30-year retirement funded by savings that the 4% rule suggests generates about $30,000 per year before taxes and health insurance

A Reddit thread in r/personalfinance on living off $750,000 in retirement drew dozens of responses, with one commenter cutting to the heart of it: “It’s a hard choice. You cannot really get what you want, which seems to be a 65k pretax income for the rest of your life indexed for inflation.” That’s the tension in plain language.

The Math That Governs This Decision

The 4% rule applied to $750,000 produces $30,000 per year. That’s your baseline withdrawal before taxes, before health insurance, and before inflation eats into it over time.

Health insurance for a 60-year-old without employer coverage is the single largest wildcard. ACA Marketplace silver plan premiums for a 60-year-old without a subsidy run roughly $977 per month, or about $11,700 per year, according to MoneyGeek’s 2026 data. That’s before deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. And ACA premiums rose by a median of about 18% in 2026, the largest increase since 2018, per the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. Your subsidy eligibility depends on your income — if your withdrawals are modest, you may qualify for meaningful ACA subsidies, which changes the calculus significantly.

After health insurance, the remaining income from a 4% withdrawal is thin. Living on $18,000 to $20,000 per year for five years until Medicare eligibility is workable, only with very low spending needs and no unexpected expenses.

Core PCE inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure — has risen consistently from 125.5 in April 2025 to 128.9 by February 2026, sitting at its highest point in the 12-month observation window. That sustained upward drift means the real purchasing power of a fixed $30,000 withdrawal shrinks each year.

Two Paths That Change the Outcome

Path 1: Retire now, withdraw conservatively, delay Social Security to 70. You draw from savings for 10 years before Social Security, which maximizes your eventual monthly benefit. The maximum Social Security benefit for someone claiming at 70 in 2026 is $5,181 per month, according to the SSA — roughly double what you’d receive at 62. Waiting pays off if you live past your early 80s, which is the statistical probability for a 60-year-old in reasonable health. The risk: a decade of market downturns early in retirement could permanently impair your portfolio before Social Security bridges the gap.

Path 2: Work two to three more years, retire at 62 or 63. This is the more conservative path. Two additional years of contributions and compounding reduce the withdrawal burden. More importantly, it closes most of the healthcare gap: you’d only need to bridge two to three years of private insurance before Medicare at 65, rather than five. Working until 62 also lets you claim Social Security as a backstop if markets perform poorly.

A third option: partial retirement. Consulting or part-time work generating $15,000 to $20,000 per year dramatically reduces the withdrawal rate required from savings, extending portfolio longevity by years.

The RMD Clock and Tax Planning

Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from traditional IRAs and 401(k)s begin at age 73 under current IRS rules. You have 13 years before RMDs force withdrawals. That window is an opportunity: if your income is low in early retirement, you can do Roth conversions at favorable tax rates, reducing future RMD obligations and tax exposure. The Fed funds rate sits at 3.8%, and the 10-year Treasury yields about 4.3% — a reasonably attractive environment for building a bond ladder or CD ladder to cover near-term spending without selling equities during a downturn.

Three Things to Decide Before You Quit

1. Run your actual spending number, not a guess. If your realistic annual spending is $55,000 or more, $750,000 is not enough to retire at 60 without additional income sources. If you can genuinely live on $40,000 to $45,000 — including healthcare — the math becomes workable, especially once Social Security arrives.
2. Solve the healthcare gap first. Price out your actual ACA options based on your projected withdrawal income. At lower income levels, subsidies can dramatically reduce premiums. If your withdrawals push you above the subsidy cliff, the cost jumps sharply. Structuring withdrawals to stay subsidy-eligible in the early years is a legitimate tax planning strategy worth exploring with a fee-only financial planner specializing in pre-Medicare retirement transitions.
3. Don’t claim Social Security early out of anxiety. Claiming at 62 locks in a permanently reduced benefit for life. The break-even age between claiming at 62 versus waiting until 70 is typically around the early-to-mid 80s. If you’re in good health, waiting is almost always the better financial decision — and your paid-off home gives you the flexibility to do it.

The post I’m 60, Just Paid Off My $1 Million Home and Have $750K in Retirement Savings — Can I Retire Now? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..