In Retirement, It’s Time to Put Our Costs Under the Microscope

The first couple of years in retirement are often the most difficult. But they also can set the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically. Stephen Kreider Yoder, 67, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, 68, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly  Retirement Rookies   column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with early in retirement .

Karen

“Um, Karen?” Steve said without looking away from his computer. He was using the unnaturally neutral tone that means he’s trying not to sound judgmental.

“Oh, no,” I responded. “What is it?”

His screen showed the month’s credit-card statement. “What’s this bill for $28?” he asked. Then, after a few clicks: “Hmm, looks like it’s each month since August last year.”

We were in the study pouring over our spending records to smoke out what we call “parasites”—recurring costs that quietly suck dollars and give little or nothing in return.

I had no idea what the $28 was for, I said, racking my brain for several minutes. “Oh, wait. Yes, last August was when my sewing machine stopped working.” I had found a website that promised advice on how to fix my Bernina Sport 802. It didn’t help, I took the machine to an expert and I forgot about the advice site.

Here it was, much later, leaching a monthly fee. I must have used the credit card thinking it was a one-off.

Parasites like this were also infesting us back when we were working. But ever since our salaries stopped, each dollar seems to have grown in value. And retirement has given us the time to finally ferret out the freeloaders and to analyse what a drain they are on our wallets.

We decided to review every credit-card transaction and bank debit of the past year—and cancel as many recurring charges as we can.

Some parasites are unwitting, like the help-site bill. Others are for services we once wanted and don’t use anymore—like our Netflix account, which we’d been talking about canceling for two years. It was just $15.49 a month, so did we really want to lose it? Yes. We pulled the plug in October. (Sorry, kids, if you were still tapping in.)

Some sponges aren’t obvious from our statements alone. I recently realised that boxes of our eco-friendly dishwasher detergent were piling up. I thought I was buying online when we ran out but had mistakenly OK’d a monthly subscription instead.

Even where a service is useful, there are sometimes free alternatives. I was paying $14.95 a month for audio books. I canceled and now borrow them free of charge from the San Francisco Public Library. We’ll save nearly $180 a year.

We began looking for leaches more broadly and identified a subspecies: the lost-opportunity parasite. After we retired, we began riding city buses and local rail more often, pulling out adult-rate transit cards we’d accumulated. Then it occurred to us that we were leaving money on the table by not getting half-price senior passes: $1.25 for the bus instead of $2.50. Duh!

More lost opportunity awaited in a stack of gift cards I had rubber-banded together in my desk drawer including several from Barnes & Noble bookstores and Peet’s Coffee. I took a bus to the nearest Barnes & Noble, learned there was $30 on the cards and did some early Christmas shopping. All together, the gift cards were storing $225.

The $28-a-month parasite tracing to my sewing machine proved easy to exterminate. I called the customer-care number, negotiated a partial refund of $84 and canceled the subscription.

That will save $336 a year, enough to pay an expert to fix my Bernina several times over.

Steve

There’s a parasite down in the garage, it occurred to me after a bill came in the mail from the DMV.

The letter asked for $162 to renew the registration on my vintage Honda CB750 for a year. I nearly paid it, as I’ve done annually, each year vowing to tune the bike up and get it back on the road within months.

It’s one of two old Honda motorcycles that I’ve written about before—how they once brought me joy in the restoring but now are mostly garage gewgaws.

Our anti-parasite crusade forced me to get honest with myself last month. I could no longer use the excuse that I’ll get to the 750 after I retire. I’ve had two years, and I’m not likely to get to it next year.

So I registered the bike for non operation at $27, saving $135. Now I need to phone our insurer and back out of the $436-a-year policy on the bike. Between those two parasitic bills, I have probably paid more than the value of the bike over the seven years that I haven’t ridden it.

Maybe I can get the other bike on the road, the CB350F. If not, I’ll assign non operational status to it when the DMV bills me for it.

Still, the hardest parasite to face may be the biggest one of all: our house.

We love being retired in San Francisco, and our thriving neighbourhood has proved to be the perfect environment for a couple of aging city slickers. We are walking distance to restaurants, shops, libraries, parks and pickleball courts, and a 20-minute bike ride to the beach or nearly any other place in a city full of vibrant districts. Circles of friends are nearby.

Our home is a Victorian museum piece with a classic San Francisco feel that makes us feel even more part of our city.

But it’s too big, and it is increasingly becoming a financial and psychological drain. What we dish out in mortgage payments, home and earthquake insurance, utilities and property taxes could rent us a decent house in the Midwest with money left over to travel half the year.

There’s also the constant maintenance, the bane of a vintage-house owner. Tourists and residents alike love this city’s Painted Ladies, but we owners must fight constant entropy to keep them made up with paint jobs and preserved detail.

That’s not to mention the costs within. A decrepit old breaker box had been nagging at me from the garage wall for years, silently reminding me every time I walked past that we needed to replace it with a higher-amp box that was up to modern code.

I put off the task because of the cost. I could do it myself when I had time, I imagined, and avoided thinking about it—easy to do when life was busy with workplace and family demands.

I finally hired an electrician, who came in September to replace the breaker box and the wiring that fed it. There’s still the balky ancient redwood gutter to fix, and some plumbing issues.

We’re not ready to sell out and move to the Midwest, which we might eventually do when we’re in our slower years. And we can’t stomach the pain of looking for a smaller place in San Francisco.

So we’ll live with this big parasite for now, the elephant in the room as we hunt down smaller leaches.