It has been a few months since I last visited this forum and nothing has changed. The same old stories keep appearing. Posters talking to themselves mainly.

For me, the last couple of months was hectic - workwise. At 56, instead of seeing my workload easing off, I am taking on more load. Sigh. Waiting for the day to offload some of the work to my younger colleague when he gets promoted.

Financially, my wife and I are ok. We have established our passive income streams. We are looking at a likely $150k passive income this year despite many of the companies reducing their dividend payout. We made up for the reduced dividends by accumulating more shares/bonds. In the meantime, we do not plan to retire anytime soon. As I have shared before, the period from age 50+ to 60+ is when you see your financial obligations tapering off while your salary peaks or is peaking. This is the period where your savings rate accelerates.

From the age of 50, for every year that we worked, we saved enough to last us 3 years in retirement at the current standard of living. No doubt, this was helped greatly by the passive income we have been getting. At $150k, the passive income would cover our annual expense, including an overseas holiday for a family of 4. This would mean that we could practically saved our full salary for this year. Going forward, if we can grow our passive income by 3% per year, we will be confident of keeping pace of inflation and we will be ready for retirement.