My wife says we can't afford to retire, yet she wants to take an $8,000 trip to Italy. We have $4 million. Do I keep working?

By Quentin Fottrell

'I worry about healthcare, long-term care, inflation, a long bear market and living to 95'

"Neither of us spends much on ourselves. We don't have a boat or a club membership, and a big night out is the Italian place three miles from home." (Photo subjects are models.)

Dear Quentin,

I've been married 31 years and have two grown children, 29 and 31, and three grandchildren. I want to retire, and my wife says we can't afford to. That's odd, because we have $4 million saved, and our house, worth roughly $1.1 million, is paid off. I'm 60 and my wife is 58, so we're quite close to retirement anyway. We have no debt, and our kids are financially independent.

Neither of us spends much on ourselves. We don't have a boat or a club membership, and a big night out is the Italian place three miles from home. I make $230,000 a year and my wife makes $110,000, and we've spent 35 years saving and investing. By any reasonable measure we should be happy about where we are. Instead, we argue about money all the time.

She thinks we have enough, and I'm not convinced. I've always been the cautious one. I'm the person who reads the 401(k) statements and knows our expense ratios, and I keep a spreadsheet that models our portfolio under different withdrawal rates. I also read the financial news every morning. My wife says it's not a hobby, it's "monitoring the apocalypse."

When the market fell sharply last year in reaction to the tariffs, I did get cold feet and told her we might have to work another three years. She pointed out that the portfolio had still grown a lot over the previous decade. I said that didn't matter, because we don't know what comes next. Whenever the market drops, I check our accounts before I check my email.

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Worries about healthcare and inflation

I worry about healthcare, long-term care, inflation, a long bear market and living to 95. I worry that one of us will need expensive care, or that the kids will need help, or that the grandchildren will need money for college. My wife says I've built an endless list of hypothetical disasters so I never have to make a decision.

Something recently made me doubt myself. She wanted to take an $8,000 trip to Italy for our 30th anniversary, and I said no. It wasn't that we couldn't afford it. I just didn't think we should spend that much on a vacation while we're both still working. She asked what the point of having $4 million is if we can't spend $8,000 of it.

She puts almost all of her income into our retirement savings, and I put in more because I earn more. Last month, she wanted to replace our 12-year-old car. I said the old one runs fine, and she said she could buy a new one from her own account. She said, "It's my money." I said, "Yes, but we're married." She looked at me and said, "Only when it's convenient."

How much is enough? And where does careful planning turn into control? I don't want to be the guy who works until 70 on top of millions because he's afraid of a future that may never arrive. But I also don't want to retire at 60 and find out at 80 that it wasn't enough. How do we find the line between reasonable caution and never letting ourselves enjoy what we worked for?

60-Year-Old Husband

You can email The Moneyist with any financial and ethical questions at qfottrell@marketwatch.com. The Moneyist regrets he cannot reply to questions individually.

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Fall on your respective swords. Admit that you are terrified too.

Dear 60-Year-Old,

It would be ideal, if not absolutely necessary, if you each retired with the other's blessing.

But first, happy belated birthday! It's a great achievement to make it to 60. I have a feeling those birthday candles lit a fire under you. You have, perhaps, realized that your time is limited, and you are ready to put that $4 million to work. You're correct that retirement can last 30 years or longer, so it's important to be sure of what you're doing before pulling the plug. That's why so many retirees work part-time, or keep working even into their 70s. They don't all have millions of dollars in investments.

But that urge to stop working after turning 60 and your many unresolved anxieties about retirement are, to an extent, in conflict. Your own inner dialogue is being played out with your wife, but it doesn't have a great deal of consistency. You are both, if you'll excuse the pun, all over the map. She wants to take an $8,000 vacation, but you don't believe in spending that kind of money on a trip. At the same time, she prefers that you both keep working, while you're close to making the leap into retirement.

Your financial circumstances are also at odds with your perception of them. You live modestly. You don't own a boat or belong to an expensive country club, and you have $4 million in investments waiting for you to tap. You are a couple of low-key individuals who don't feel the need to buy flashy cars or post on Instagram about expensive vacations to justify your place in the world. But now you have to accept that you are the kind of person who can retire early(ish).

You are both, if you'll excuse the pun, all over the map.

I wonder if your unwillingness or inability to move on from the accumulation phase of your retirement is because, after 35 years, saving and investing has been synonymous with psychological safety. It's not an unusual place to be. Now you must let go of those reins and accept that it's OK to live on a finite amount of money. That transition can, for some people, be harder than accumulating the money in the first place.

If you both retire before you're 65, you will have to pay for private health insurance, which could amount to a significant sum through the Affordable Care Act. The final cost will depend on your income, location, plan and eligibility for subsidies. That will be your biggest initial expense. In a way, I agree with your wife. If you're going to take an $8,000 holiday of a lifetime to Europe, take it while you still have jobs and workplace health insurance.

When you get more comfortable with your retirement lifestyle, and you sit down with your adviser - who will outline your expenses, income and your vacation budget - you will feel a bit more at ease taking these kinds of trips. You wouldn't even have to adhere to the common 4% withdrawal rule for your $4 million portfolio: You would only need a 2.5% withdrawal rate on $4 million, well below the traditional 4% guideline, to give you a cool $100,000 a year.

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Settling on a retirement income

But there are caveats to that: If most of the money is in 401(k)s and traditional IRAs, withdrawals are taxable income. The 4% rule was built around a 30-year retirement, and retiring at 60 could mean 35 years or more, so some planners use 3.5% to 3.75% for a longer horizon. Still, you're at 2.5%. So if your actual annual expenses were $100,000 a year, you would need to withdraw more than 2.5% from your nest egg to cover the taxes.

It's better to avoid being forced to sell large amounts of stocks after a major market decline than to try to predict when the market will recover. That's where sequence-of-returns risk comes in: The order in which gains and losses occur can matter greatly when you are withdrawing money. A cash or bond reserve, a flexible spending plan and an ability to reduce discretionary spending during a market downturn would help manage that risk.

So how do you deal with this impasse with your wife? Fall on your respective swords. Admit that you are terrified too. Consider exploring the idea of working less (although this is not always possible). It will be far easier to make a decision jointly when you both have the figures in black and white, with the help of your financial adviser. The only way through this marital disconnect and fear of and longing for retirement is through the figures.

You would only need to take 2.5% from your $4 million.

And now a word of warning: Your disagreement with your wife over when to retire may be a symptom of a deeper problem. Her sharp response that you cite your marriage "only when it's convenient" suggests to me that there may be other lingering resentments, maybe because you earn more, or due to other spanners in the way you communicate with each other.

How much is enough? That's the conundrum that millions of people your age face. When do you call time on working? It depends on a lot of different factors: how much you enjoy your work, how much of your energy and time it demands, how stressful your job is, whether you like your colleagues and what you want to do with your free time. You don't want to retire if you're worried about your long-term financial certainty, but you don't want to retire into a vacuum, either.

Agree with your wife on a "fun-money" budget - a pot of money you can dip tino for leisure activities without regret, rumination or recrimination. Set a retirement date and a realistic annual spending plan, and come to an agreement on what sacrifices you would make if the market fell sharply. You could even consider part-time work or a phased retirement. It may be that easing into this next chapter, like getting into a cold sea, is more your speed.

Who knows? When your wife turns 60 in two years, she may feel exactly like you do.

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Do you have questions about inheritance, financial literacy or etiquette, estate planning, friendship, divorce, or other tricky money issues relating to family and friends? Send them to MarketWatch's Moneyist on qfottrell@marketwatch.

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