Retirement: My Honest Advice to Anyone Working Past Age 55 (Retire NOW)
This video showed up in my YouTube timeline and the title read like something I should share, Why? Before I retired, my notes were very focused on how to get to retirement, but after I retired, my attitude about these notes changed. Now I'm focused on post-retirement. Today I felt like I needed to throw the folks still working a bone.
This video is a story from a financial advisor about a client who had a plan, was miserable, and decided to change their plan. The client, a mother, was not a very nice person, but vacation mom was quite different.
I could never say I was miserable at work. I enjoyed my work and the people I worked with. What I didn't realize, until I retired, was how much I was thinking about work when I wasn't there.
Early in my career I was working on a new control system that went into production. I was on-call all the time. There weren't any pagers, so anytime I went somewhere I had to call the plant and let Security know where I was going, and what the phone number was. It was miserable for awhile. I started to dream about work and had trouble sleeping. This became one of those moments in life when I had to have a serious talk with myself about what I was doing and where this was heading.
Another notable incident was a strange bug in some code we'd deployed in Concord. Every time a furnace would run, the control system wouldn't let it start again until the computer was rebooted. This problem nagged me and my contractor for a week or two. I spent every waking moment trying to work out what might be happening. My contractor was ready to "code around the bug." I remember driving back to Wilmington late one Friday when the possible cause finally entered my mind. I couldn't wait to get back on-line and look at some code. This problem consumed me a few more days until we could deploy a change, and the problem fixed.
Those weren't isolated incidents though. Many times when I met with PPD or AMT about some new idea they had, I'd start thinking about how I'd do the code work. I know none of this was unique to me, but it was a bit eye-opening when I turned it off.
I think I retired too late at 65. I didn't focus on my financial situation early enough. I also didn't consider at all how much I'd enjoy life without thinking about work. For example, with a day or two left on a vacation trip, I'd start thinking about my first few days back to work. This happened every time, but no more, and makes the vacation trip even better. It's difficult to value this change in attitude.