A couple of decades ago a golfing buddy told me something that really made sense to me. He was retiring in his mid-50s and said to retire you need 3 things. You don’t need crazy amounts of any of the 3, but you needed some decent amount of each:
1 - you need enough $. You don’t need to be rich, but you don’t want to be pinching every penny and worrying about bills.
2 - you need to be decently healthy. No, you don’t have to start running marathons, but you want to be healthy enough to do what you want to do. Which leads to:
3 - you need some interest to fill your time. Can be anything - or any number of things. But you just have to have SOMETHING you look forward to doing, and to fill the hours, as you wake every day.
Sure - not revelatory or anything, but put things into a sensible perspective for me.
Personally, I’m 61, with 35+ years with my employer. Between my work savings plan, my pension, and eventual Social Security, not to mention personal savings and investments, I’m pretty sure I could retire and my wife and I could pretty much do whatever we wanted for the rest of our lives. (We’ve never been extravagant, and don’t have any really pricey “wants.”) But it is a HUGE step to go from INCREASING your nest egg, to DRAWING FROM it.
There is NOTHING about my job that I enjoy or derive satisfaction from, other than the pay check. And it IS a darned nice paycheck. Meanwhile, even when we go back into the office, I have only a 6 minute commute, and I work no OT. I have generous leave and great flexibility in using it. So I have the $ and time to engage in pretty much anything I want to do - which currently amounts to golf, biking, and music, and some travel.
So, while I COULD probably retire today, I don’t really HAVE to. And each additional year I work just adds to the nest egg and defers drawing from it, allowing me to be more generous to my friends and family and making my eventual retirement all the more comfortable and stress free. The main thing I needed to do was get my mind around being less emotionally engaged w/ my work, because that only caused stress. But stepping back a couple of steps, I could see doing this for some more years.
So I dunno. Right now I’m assuming I’ll work till full SS retirement - which I think is 67 or so for me. But, if things change drastically, it could be tomorrow.