"My wife grew up poor and fears poverty more than just about anything else. I’m no longer sure there is any kind of bump that would get her comfortable with full retirement."
I understand where she's coming from.
I have the same mental struggles with money and retirement.
I didn't grow up poor, but damned close to it at times. Dad was a fantastic engineer but not at all good with money. If there was a money decision to be made, chances are pretty good he'd make the wrong one. Plus it didn't help that it was the 1970s when the interstate highway system was pretty much finished and his job was going away, so he struck out on his own, in a crappy economy. He struggled along for a number of years until he folded up shop and went back to work for another company. That didn't end well, but he finally really locked it down in the early 1990s when the town where he grew up needed a new city engineer and hired him. Worked out great stability wise for Mom and Dad, but ultimately he was still making the same bad financial choices he had always made.
There were times when we were buying 5 gallons of kerosene at a time to put into the boiler because we couldn't afford a tank of heating oil.
Mom's inheritance from her parents largely put me through college, and I always tried very hard to make sure Mom and Dad had enough money when I could spare. I might have bitched about shelling out money to buy Mom's heating oil and work on her house for her, but that's all it was, it was bitching. There was no way I wasn't going to do that. I did everything I could to keep her in that house for as long as she lived, even if at the end she didn't really remember that it was her house. At least it was familiar to her, because my Dad had grown up there and they were friends from the time they were about 10 until he died in 2007.
The whole mess when Mom died was damned frightening with what she did with her will and everything, but I came through that, and now I get to concentrate 100% on my retirement.
Seeing how my parents struggled with financial management when I was a kid made me make some very hard choices about what I wanted and how I wanted to get it. I forced myself to learn, and practice, solid financial management, and to a large degree its paid off. Yeah, I've gotten lucky in some things (like not having to get rid of the house when the ex and I broke up), but there are a LOT of things that I regret, too. It also helped that I went to work for Navy Federal Credit Union writing, oddly enough, a lot of financial educational materials for new service members. Stuff like how to balance your checkbook, how not to get screwed over on a loan, how to budget... a lot of which I had to learn while I was writing about it.
Anyway, the biggest thing advice I can give you is mind the money, but don't make your later years filled with regret for what you never did because you, or someone else, was afraid of it.
