James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

Norm said:
What I Learned in (Pre) Retirement

It turned out that I had 3 weeks off between the jobs, which you could say was unemployment but what I consider to be pre-retirement. It was a sort of dry run on what life might be like in a few years. While I wasn't entirely removed from the job thing because I was doing lots of interviews, I did generally take it easy and just try to enjoy it. So here is what I learned in my time of pre-retirement.

1. Doing it while your spouse works is less enjoyable. I found myself sort of aimless most days with nobody to hang out with. I ended up getting coffee with Kirt a few times but for the most part, I sort of tooled around the house not really driven to do anything significant. So you should plan to both retire at the same time. Note that if it were possible to mountain bike, this would have been less of an issue.

2. I spend a lot of money. This is not entirely true but man, it's easy to spend money when you have lots of free time.

3. You need a purpose. It's pretty obvious upon reflection that work does give us a purpose. I think this is correlated to point 1. But I often found myself not knowing exactly what to do with myself. If D had been off too, I'm sure we would have gone skiing. But being solo, I didn't know what to do with myself most days. I didn't really feel like taking on any major home projects in the time off.

4. Not working is fucking great. Do I need to explain this?

5. I want to retire having done something useful with my end-of-career. I left the last job with a really shitty taste in my mouth. We briefly talked about my never going back to work but with the 3 kids still needing to go through college, it would have been a dumb idea. But more than that, I want to use the last years of my career to do something somewhat meaningful and productive. So far, this job is looking to be a good fit for that. I want to actually make a difference to someone before I hang up my skates.

I think that's enough. I'm not shedding any great truth with item #4 above. But the other ones were a little unexpected and became pretty clear in those 3 weeks. Again, if I could have ridden outside I think it would have been a little different. But I think the conclusions would have generally been the same if my full time job would have been to ride bikes.

I know Tim recently retired, so I would be curious what he thinks about all this.

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Oh, so now I have to examine my life too? Thanks a lot, pal. 😀

First of all, #4.

#1. For me this is true. My wife has to work until June of 2027 to get her small (but not insignificant) pension, so I'm solo retired for now. I sometimes resist planning fun things to do during the day because I feel a bit guilty doing them without my wife. I think once it gets nicer out it will be a little less of an issue.

#2. I do find it's easy to spend more when you can spend endless hours looking for cool stuff on the web (and while planning for a cross-country bike trip in a few months). However, my financial guy keeps telling me that we need to transition more into "spending" mode vs. "savings" mode now that I'm retired. I just read Die With Zero, and I really connected with the idea that we should plan to spend the money that we spent a lifetime saving to have fun and have great experiences while we are still in good enough health/fitness to enjoy them. Another thing that stuck with me is the "Living Legacy" concept where you give money to people/charities while you're still alive, so that you can actually enjoy the effects of your gifts.

#3. While I do think that you need a purpose in retirement, I think that purpose can be "find experiences that make you happy", whatever that may be, rather than find a new job in retirement. When I retired, one question I was asked a lot was "Are you going to work part-time and consult?" My answer was "Absolutely not, especially not right away". I knew for me, that would be a short track right back to working full time. I wanted to make a clean break from working, and if I think I want to do something else in the future there is always that option. My plan since I retired is to ride my bike more, join a gym, maybe do some volunteering, spend more time with family/friends, and plan my bike trip. Once I get done with the trip, I plan to spend some more time on trail maintenance and continuing to help out with Habitat for Humanity when I can.

#4. Duh, see above.

#5. Obviously, I think this is really personality dependent. While I loved what did during my engineering career, it never really defined who I was, or what I felt my identity was. I know that many of the people that I used to work with really don't have many hobbies or interests other than work, and that kind of defines them. One of my good friends is struggling right now with the retirement decision because he thinks of himself as the "laser guy" and he wonders what he will be after retirement. I was lucky enough to have some good projects that I delivered near the end of my career, so I wasn't too bothered leaving the last one unfinished. I considered trying to finish out that program, but the schedule and customer were so unreasonable, I just knew I was signing up for another year of pure pain/hell. My stress levels have have gone from off the charts, to almost non-existent.

I understand if you still enjoy the work and need the money (college is crazy expensive), but I would advise retiring as soon as you can if you can make it work. I know you guys seem to be very good at finding and following through on those experiences that make you happy, so my guess is that you'll have a blast in retirement.
 
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