I “retired” about 15 years ago to be a stay-at-home husband, so my decision process isn’t really relevant to most peoples’ decision. Vastly different criteria. 
My wife has decided to retire this June 30, at the end of her firm’s fiscal year when she is 57. She is a partner at one of the Big 4 accounting firms, and would have been essentially forced into retirement at 60, so while she’s retiring early it’s not absurdly so. Oddly enough, it’s one of the few upsides to the 2020 pandemic situation.
She was a real road warrior - gone most of the week, often to multiple locations. 200k+ miles flown every year. We were actually working on moving to India for a few years where she would finish out her career. Then COVID happened, business travel ground to a halt, and India was no longer a practicality. So, we spent 11 months and counting in lockdown and discovered the following:
- We still like each other, which from our observation of other couples she works with is a rarer thing than you might think.
- As much as we love to travel (and enjoyed doing so), we are both homebodies as well. The hardest part about not traveling for the last year has not been not doing it, it is the resentment of not being able to, if that makes sense.
- Being at home all the time gave us a sense of what retirement could look like, and almost a year’s worth of financial data around “steady-state” expenses, so we could start to get a pretty realistic picture of our finances in retirement.
We’ve saved a lot over the years, and compared to a number of my wife’s peers, have lived quite below our means, at least by societal standards. The entirety of our debt is our mortgage, which is currently about 37% of the value of our home, and the day she leaves her firm the equity she gets back from the partnership pays off the mortgage and then some. We will have $0 in debt within a month of her retirement.
We have good cash reserves, a healthy 401(k), and my wife vested in her firm’s retirement plan a year ago. She can take most of that in a lump sum payment, with the rest coming as an annuity. My wife thinks in Excel, so has multiple spreadsheets to game-plan various scenarios, and if we can consistently get around 4% return on our money, we should run out when my wife hits 100 (and I reach 96). With some judicious, but not radical, paring of our expenses we shouldn’t see a significant change in our lifestyle, if at all.
We are incredibly fortunate that things have turned out the way they have, and I know that a large number of people don’t get to simply decide to retire when they feel like it. OTOH, I can’t wait for June 30, and more importantly for 4-6 months later when all of the stress hormones have finally flushed out of my wife’s system, she’s caught up on her sleep, and she’s able to do all the exercise she loves. I am really looking forward to her future happiness.
And she’s already signed up for multiple garment-making seminars and couture sewing classes. She will have no problems whatsoever filling her days. 