Last week, one of my favourite project managers at work announced he was retiring early. He’s in his mid to early 50’s with a couple of teenagers. I’ll miss him, but I’m also really happy for him.
My husband works for the city and has an excellent pension. He’s eligible for retirement at 53 and plans to take it. I have a good retirement plan as well, and should be able to retire around the same age. If we can swing it, we’d love to retire earlier than that, but we’d have to make some adjustments to our plan contributions to reach that goal and right now we enjoy our comfortable ($$) life too much to put away more money.
So, have any of you retired early, or do you plan to retire early? How?
Nope, no interest. I know I may change my tune later, yadda yadda. But I am really bad with unstructured time, and don’t have the discipline to make that structure for myself.
I counted the days till I was done with maternity leave, hate teleworking, and even get grumpy on snow days. I love me some going to the office.
I may retire at 55, then work part-time. That’s when my State Government Pension kicks in.
Even if the job pays less, my commuting expenses will vanish, mostly.
We’ve been essentially retired for several years, but I’d have to put a string of footnotes on that sentence to put it in context.
The basics:
The traditional notion of retirement is a shuck, a combination of an antiquated system of employment and a thoroughly modern system of squeezing consumers for every dime they can earn to spend. I don’t believe in “retirement,” at all.
Save money, beginning with your first paycheck, and do it by learning to resist the endless calls to blow it on hookers and blow… or toys, or luxury goods, or pointlessly “upscale” anything.
Learn to live less expensively; flip side of 2.
Do something that you can adapt and reshape every few years, all the way until you’re really ready to let go of “working” on any terms, which might be at 40 or 80 or death. Avoid careers that are utterly dependent on a controlling employer - e.g., you can be a machinist or accountant for Pratt & Whitney or as an independent, but you can’t do much on your own as a systems analyst or teacher.
Probably not. We live cheaply, but we don’t pull in all that much money either. Both of us work for ourselves. My husband is the real breadwinner right now.
Because we work for ourselves, though, we hope to be happy to keep working until we die.
I think number four is especially great advice. I see a lot of retirees in my line of work that later come back as part time consultants (for probably double what they made as an employee ).
Just to expand on what our retirement would look like, we have older, retired neighbours, Jack and Diane, who are in their late 70’s. They are still very active - travelling regularly, both ski and hike, and they have kids and grandkids that visit often. They are busy. This is what my husband and I are aiming for. Granted, life can get in the way of living actively past retirement, but if my maternal grandmother is any indication, I’ll be travelling to New Zealand well in to my 90’s. We take care of ourselves now so we can fully enjoy retirement when the time comes.
Really, that’s a lot of what I have against the common notion of “retirement.”
The idea that we spend the better (best) part of our lives grinding away at something that pays the bills and buys the toys, then at 60 or 70 we suddenly cast off the chains and have fun, is a huge, misguided shuck. As you note, life and health don’t always grant us that luxury, of being healthy and mobile and able to “go have fun.”
F*ck the notion that our lives until 65 belong to the system - especially the part of the system that demands we earn and spend every cent we can.
Yes, I agree, which is why we’re trying to strike a balance between what we can do now and what we want to do later. We don’t have kids, so we spend a lot of time doing the things we love (travel, cycling, hiking, spending time in nature, etc.) and we have a good work/life balance I think. Both of us don’t want to have any regrets later in life. I won’t wake up in my older age and think ‘gee, I wish I would have worked more’. So, we live with that in mind (while still saving for early retirement, which is tough!).
We are “semi-retired” now - I’m actually looking for a job because I’m bored and I crave the financial stability - I haven’t worked for more than a year by choice. My husband does part time IT consulting.
We saved a ton of money with two full time professional jobs for 20+ years and lived relatively frugally given our income. We can’t afford to completely retire - and still live the life we want to live - especially with the kids still at home. We could afford to retire if we were willing to downsize our lives and we didn’t have kids (in fact, a bunch of money is tied up in kid’s college funds - if we hadn’t had kids, we’d have about five or more years of living expenses right there.)
The kids are in high school - I’m thinking we will keep with one of us at least working more or less full time through college - but I suspect the next eight to ten years are more about balance - not about two people working full time jobs. At about that time we will be coming onto the magic 59 1/2 when we can start freeing up 401ks.
One thing to be aware of - staying home can be expensive. And that is one of the reasons I’m bored and want to go back to work. I can afford to be home - but I can’t afford to be home and play golf and redecorate and join a health club and take up weaving and…(some of that I’m not interested in at all, but you get the idea). So to retire frugally - computer games and reading like glee does are good. Physical activity that is free or cheap (running, walking) is good - but expensive yoga clubs and golf get expensive. Getting your house in order by cleaning, getting rid of stuff, etc. is good - even just cans of paint can get expensive when you start wanting to change. Travel is almost always expensive (though it can be done cheaper - it almost always is expensive when you are talking about a small actual income and spending your capital). Cooking is good - going out to lunch with your girlfriends because now you have time gets expensive. And it can get easy to get bored - or overspend to avoid bored. One of the great injustices of a good income is that while you make it you don’t have time to spend it, and once you don’t make it, the savings you stuck aside doesn’t really go far enough to spend your summer in Europe (which we could have easily afforded on two full time incomes - but without time :))
I’d like to downshift in my 40s, and make a living with 20-30 hours a week of labor. I think I’m on track to do that.
How do I plan on doing it? no kids, no debt, expect an inheritance in my 50s, get good health care and if need be (mostly due to the health care issue) leave the country. If I stay in the country buy a condo and pay it off. Where I live they are cheap and a decent one starts at 50k.
I keep calling dibs on the lottery jackpots. . When that pays off, I’ll be out of the workforce for good. In the unlikely event that it never pays off, my plan B is to work until I die.
You’ll double dip, though, right? Or, what will you do?
Me, I’m 53 and currently figuring what my magic number is, and trying to figure out how to generate income when I’m not working. I’d like to quit at 60-65.
Such a great question. I have no idea what I am going to do. I certainly do not intend to stop working, that is certain. I am currently working on my Master’s degree in Space Operations Management, but really I have no idea if that is going to have anything to do with my life after the Army or not. I just wanted a science-focused degree, and Aeronautical Science seemed like an interesting idea at the time.
When I was in the Marines, I worked through and got my bachelors degree - in Applied Mathematics, with a Computer Science minor. My service had kept me away from my young family for long stretches, so once I secured that degree I transitioned out and into a good civilian career. No regrets, but having put in 13 good years, in hindsight it would’ve been great to have done my 20. When one is 30, 7 more years seem like such a long time…
Good on ya’, and good luck to you with that. I’d be interested in keeping in touch either through this board or maybe LinkedIn to see where you end up going, what you end up doing.
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