We were supposed to move to India for a few years to cap off my wife’s career, but…[waves around at all this].
Even with vaccines coming on line and getting more widely distributed, neither one of us is comfortable moving to a densely populated city with a…shall we say, “less than robust?”…public health system. My wife’s company still has everyone working from home, and isn’t talking about going back to the office until July at the earliest. No point in going all the way to Bangalore just to continue to work virtually.
So, she’s retiring instead, and I couldn’t be more happy for her. The past year has essentially been practice for retirement; we hang around at home together, she sews, I cook, we read our books and we drink our wine. She has an excellent retirement plan, we have a nice nest egg in our savings, and she’s just done with the rat race. We’ve been tracking our expenses over the past 6 months or so, and post-retirement shouldn’t look all that different financially than pre-retirement. We’ve set aside some savings for a little bucket-list travel that we’ll do over the next few years, but those are all the big extravagances we’ve got in mind. We’ve been pretty happy being locked in together; I could stand a while more of this.
We’re both disappointed that we didn’t get to have this last big adventure, but I am not sorry that she’s got this opportunity to throttle back and get busy enjoying her life. She’s had a great and highly successful career, but it’s time to move on.
So, congratulations, sweetie! I am thrilled for you. (not that she’ll ever see this) 
