So we found ourselves both retired this year - and surprise surprise, income is down! Pension and a few things (and a low SWR, starting with taxable accounts until we hit 59 1/2 in the next few years as we don't want to invoke SEPP or such) and all is well.

But, a year ago, Mark with his pretty solid GG-15 government job would have qualified for a pretty sizable loan. And now, with assets somewhat locked up for a few years, one of the big banks didn't want to touch us, despite the loan size we asked for consideration for was only about a quarter of the sum of all the invested assets. Didn't matter that some of these securities had sat pretty for decades, that we have had 800+ credit scores for the same amount of time, etc. Retire early? You're truly a boutique case and they don't even understand what to do with you sometimes.

There's a couple alternative courses of action though - pay cash for the retirement house (we could always do this but wanted to see what our options were should we not want to tie up a big chunk in a very illiquid and highly price variable asset), or talk to a local broker. We did the latter and they said we can get a loan for what we are considering buying.

What is the take away? If you're close to retirement, and thinking of buying a new pad, get your reapproval letter or such - should you want that option and not be doing the cash route - before you tell off Lumbergh and not file your TPS report before flipping off Initech for the last time.

The comical bit is that the big bank said we can loan you X for a new mortgage, which was about 1/18th of the balance in our retirement accounts, and I told them that was flat out silly and is less than the equity in our current house, and less than we paid (and sold) a vacation property for over the last few years in a cash transaction. And I told them it was silly because of the rule of 55 and that we can touch 100% of my wife's 401(k) right now if we wanted to, for any purpose, and I don't even think that the big bank or its mortgage broker knew what this is. That will teach me to be an informed investor.

It's a good-ish problem to have. One I had not anticipated, this particular consequence of pulling off FIRE.