Green Retirement Blog

The easiest part of this experiment, retiring in San Francisco with less than a million dollars, is calculating the maximum monthly budget. Using the Green retirement formula,  I know that a million dollars gives me a monthly budget of $3,333.  So now, we are going to find out, not only if it is possible to retire in San Francisco for under a million dollars, but exactly how much it will cost.  Once we know the exact budget, we can then calculate, how much savings is required to retire in San Francisco.

I’m also using the Green Retirement Software, to create my budget, and track my expenses. Let’s take a look at a screenshot for the first week:

It’s only been one week, and we are nearly half-way through our budget, fortunately our major expense (housing) is behind us. Housing is costly in San Francisco, there really is no way around this fact, and does make retirement in San Francisco more expensive. In fact, for the entire nation, only Manhattan has a higher cost of housing than San Francisco.

But hey, take a look at the view from your bedroom window:

Yes, those are Parrots, they’re the famous Wild of Parrots of Telegraph Hill. And they congregate outside the bedroom window.  And the view of the San Francisco Bay makes a beautiful back-drop. So even though housing may be more expensive in San Francisco, views such as this one and many other reasons, justify the extra cost.

Visit the Green Retirement Planning Website to learn more.