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I plan to retire next year at age 56. Been working with the government for 33 years now and I am done. I have know so many people who waited to retire and either died before or shortly after they retired. There are guys I work with who are in the mid to late 60's and still working. I don't want that to happen to me. My wife is 62 and on disability so we want to have time together because you never know when the grim reaper will come calling.
Congrats mine will be June 2020. 36 years with the state. Last year I had a few health scares that told me time to slow down and take better care of myself.
DH owned a business and I had a job that required 60 hour workweeks. Yes we travelled when we could, but our trips were short as we both needed to be back on the job.
I had an opportunity to retire at 50 (he was 51)....he hesitated at first as his business was going gangbusters. In the end we cashed out and were able to take long trips to where we can enjoy a new culture, a new cuisine, gave us a new look on life. It's a different sort of travel compared to squeezing in a week here and there when you have busy careers.
We are 66 and 67 now and not one regret. Still traveling, enjoying life.
Not everyone who works has or had the schedule like your husband who was a business owner did that made lengthy travel difficult.
I am currently age 62 1/2 and have worked as an R.N. for the Federal Government/VA going on 20 years. As a Title 38 pay grade employee from day 1 of employment I received the benefit of getting 5 weeks of paid vacation annually. If I wanted to travel out of the country which I did many times I could take 3 consecutive weeks off at a time by policy and 4 if there was available staffing coverage. Having this type of time off I was able to travel extensively for the last 20 years while working, and the beauty of it was I was getting paid while doing it so essentially my travel paid for itself.
That is great that you and your husband were able to retire in your 50s to begin your travel adventures, and glad to hear you are continuing to do so now in your late 60s.
People die EVERY day. Does it really make sense to live your life based on that fact? You can do that if you want...I prefer to plan for my future. Living until 90 after you decided to retire early and only funded enough to carry you a few years...that's cray cray.
Hallelujah, and my philosophy for many decades. I retired at 46 and live on very, very little. Everything I own would fit in a 8'x10' room. I have always fixed my own older vehicles, cooked my own healthy food, cut my own grass (and what's left of my hair), shovel the snow, home repairs, etc, etc. Also started investing when I was in my early 20's by myself, never allowing some 'financial expert' to scam me of a 1-2% of assets under management fee... Making them rich while after 40 years I would have had only about 60% of what I could have by virtue of their compounding fees.
Now I'm in the position where basically I could do about anything I want, most importantly anything I want to do when I want to... I'm almost giddy with delight of not having to fight any traffic, have to go to work/shopping/anything when the roads are bad from snow, or putting up with so much of an atoms worth of B.S. from a boss, co-workers, anybody. I can always potentially make $$$, but try and buy a seconds worth of time. When you start to get older, even in your early 50's you start to see so many people you know pass away, many around your age, and your mortality really starts to become clear.
Now I have time to exercise twice a day when I want with no worries, kick back and have a cup of tea watching all of the wildlife behind my home, and have everyday feel like Friday night. I have never been bored, and it especially fits well for a super introvert such as myself. I have had flack from some in other CD threads where I mention my age as retired, and they start flinging insults as if I am lying, calling it BS, etc... Well, live under your means, don't be addicted to new expensive crap (esp vehicles), stay well as best you can, and invest early in low cost methods to make the most of compounding. Only issue that really sucks is the crazy, ****ty state of health care cost in the USA. I am using the ACA, and when I first started with it, it was OK; now it's not by virtue of the exponential rise of premiums and copays/deductibles. Madness.
Honestly who cares what people on C/D think of you. There are never a shortage of people who will judge, but it is your life and you are in control of YOUR TIME. I never really thought of being in control of my time back in my 20's and 30's. Now into my 40's, i'm really wishing I had of thought of this more back then. We sort of get into the tunnel whereby you are 'expected' to work until your 65 and like lemmings, most of us sort of just get stuck in that narrow frame of mind on how to live your life when it comes to work. You know, save a bit every month for retirement and the government will help with the rest once you're 65. What a way to just live a life where society is at the drivers seat of your life.
Now i'm like, I don't want that conventional life. I want to be in control of my time and my life as early as I can. I won't be able to swing retirement in my 40's, but at least I have a plan in place now and the goal is mid-50's to late 50's. Hey never too late.
Living until 90 after you decided to retire early and only funded enough to carry you a few years...that's cray cray.
Can't say I've ever witnessed anyone doing that (retiring early with money that will only fund a few years). I have known folks who took a planned year off to travel and then they re-entered the workforce once again when the traveling was finished. That's a nice way to spend a sabbatical.
Retiring early is a fantastic goal -- if someone can pivot and go off and do other things that are meaningful that doesn't require sitting in a veal fattening pen M - F, more power to them!
Honestly who cares what people on C/D think of you. There are never a shortage of people who will judge, but it is your life and you are in control of YOUR TIME. I never really thought of being in control of my time back in my 20's and 30's. Now into my 40's, i'm really wishing I had of thought of this more back then. We sort of get into the tunnel whereby you are 'expected' to work until your 65 and like lemmings, most of us sort of just get stuck in that narrow frame of mind on how to live your life when it comes to work. You know, save a bit every month for retirement and the government will help with the rest once you're 65. What a way to just live a life where society is at the drivers seat of your life.
Now i'm like, I don't want that conventional life. I want to be in control of my time and my life as early as I can. I won't be able to swing retirement in my 40's, but at least I have a plan in place now and the goal is mid-50's to late 50's. Hey never too late.
Very true, It's impossible for me to be hurt or care what others say about me, when I have no respect or love for them... Invisible cowards having poor manners and little class will always be there, and you have to wonder if they are driven by ignorance, jealousy... Or perhaps they simply 'get off' being a-holes to folks who share their story, wanting to simply help others???
I wish you the best of luck, and your philosophy seems sound to me. This societies prime mover is fear... Fear of the nebulous, fear of missing out, fear of each other, fear by virtue of propaganda, fear of not being enough, fear to be the true person you are, fear to not be just another work-spend-die droid, fear that even when your cup runneth over, you BETTER WANT MORE, fear that you may be satisfied with just enough. Content folks are completely antithetical to the system, content people value what they are not selling because it has no price, don't have to play the status arms race, find the simple and true superior to what can be leveraged via envy, unkindness, and self-loathing all the while the well connected/owners spew a twisted "you deserve it" mantra made possible with 360 EZ payments... ACT NOW!!! *And make sure you pay your taxes on all of the crap you buy.
I'll tie investing into how fear was a great ally, that pushed me over the threshold toward early retirement. Being an investor, I have experienced/studied boom/bust cycles, and clearly remember how 1987/early 90's and other significant downturns felt, and the fallout they produced... Then came 2008. Every day was lived by the hour to see what new calamity would befall the economy, like a doctor with a finger on the wrist, checking a thready pulse of a 50-50 patient. 5-6-7% daily drops for the DOW, some individual stocks dropping more than twice that in a single day, Bear Stearns, *POOF*... For Christs sake, there was even talk of how the government would roll out martial law to quell the massive rioting, and many commentators openly discussed, stated the USA will go out of business. Pretty scary stuff, or was it the opportunity of a lifetime?
Never before in my life, and I bet perhaps never again will I/we see such a perfect, pure binary moment. It was either the USA is a bust or it aint. History had always shown that even in the most serious situations, US markets always recover, and always go higher with time. Look no further than a DOW chart starting in the late 1800's on the left side, and look at it today at the top right... Yep, WAY, WAY higher, with plenty of 'FEARFUL' dips along the way. I had some dry powder and figured well, if the USA goes bust what does it matter, we will all sink, or if I take this $$$ and invest in low cost indexed mutual funds and some individual stocks, I may reap a very significant return. I had already had some stocks and of course always had a mix of stock and bond indexed mutual funds doing their thing, so I hit the buy signal in the face of the financial devil.
X amount of Cummins at $21/share, Intel at $15.30, Deere at $32 and many others... And all paying me a nice dividend stream to compound my gains. Even the boring and 'unsexy' S&P index funds if bought then reinvesting the dividends, and kept today would have you realize a very tidy profit of several times what you initially purchased, all with almost laughably low fees. Of course I had folks tell me I was crazy, how can you sleep at night, what are you going to do when you are broke... Same folks who were gripped with panic and FEAR, cashing out their 401k's at the bottom while still having a job, not cutting back on meaningful spending, etc, etc. So yeah, 'early' retirement is very doable if you are disciplined, have patience, and live within reasonable exceptions with regard to lifestyle. If you think I'm lying, just go to Mrmoneymoustache.com and other similar forums to read how many others have done it. I write none of this as a form of bragging - I do so because I and many others of you believe nothing is more valuable than time, and if you stick to your sound convictions, have patience, a plan and a bit of luck, should you wish to exit the working world sooner rather than later you can.
Did not mean to write a novel, but any chance I get to drive both of my thumbs into the eye of the cyclops I do so, and refuse to live in fear, envy, or in the manner our nation has coarsened to. Thanks for taking the time to read if you did so, and again best of luck.
Why not get a regular job. My daughter owns a business and she gets a hole month off every year.
To be fair, most business owners can't take a month off, and most Americans who work for someone else can't either. The example of a month off for your daughter isn't really useful since it's very rarely attainable.
Being a "Wage - Slave" is not a very bright idea. (Additive, Wages will not grow wealth (wages only enable wealth building strategies)... wealth building requires the use of multiplication)
This isn't true. Building wealth is a function of income and expenses, there is nothing unique to any particular path (working for wages, owning a business) that is some panacea for wealth building. If spending is less than income, growth of wealth will happen even if the extra is buried in the back yard.
To be fair, most business owners can't take a month off, and most Americans who work for someone else can't either. The example of a month off for your daughter isn't really useful since it's very rarely attainable.
To be fair, most people don’t work 60 hours either.
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