I retired last April at the age of 63. I looked at a number of things. First, I was fed up at my job and was ready to walk out. I had gotten a job with this company when I was 58. At that time I realized how alive and well age discrimination was. It took me almost 6 months to find a job at that time. Some things don’t improve with age.
The next thing I looked at was how much money I was bringing home every month. That established what I would need to bring home just to keep the status quo.
The next item was to actually reach out and look at what I had as retirement funding I could tap into. I had an honest-to-God retirement from one company, a good sized IRA from another company, a Roth IRA with that same company, a cash retirement from that company, an IRA from the job I was ready to quit and the wife had Social Security started.
I also realized I had to look at medical at least for me. I had my wife and I on the insurance from my work, but that would be stopping. She had also just started Medicare so that was a relief. She would still need some sort of supplemental insurance, but the big stuff was covered. I reached out to VA and found out I could get medical through them. So medical was covered.
I reached out to a retirement/finance specialist. We worked through a good plan, rolling over one of the IRAs and the Roth into annuities so I would get a guaranteed amount every month. It could go up but wouldn’t go down. Adding every thing up I found I would be bringing home at least what I had brought home with the work. And I haven’t tapped into Social Security yet.
All this made me feel good about not worrying about money. So when I got fed up at work, I walked. I told the wife that morning that a lot of garbage had been flying on emails and texts starting in the middle of the night. I told her if I came home it meant I quit my job. I went to work at 8 a.m., left before 10 a.m.
As for the mental and emotional stuff, it was a bit more difficult to describe. I had worked most of my adult life, working long hours and weird hours. When I no longer needed to do that, I spent a while feeling out of sorts, like I should be doing something but didn’t know what that would be. It made me edgy and irritable. Then I went through a period of embracing the lazy to get away from the edginess. But that was just as bad going the other way. Now I’ve sort of settled somewhere in the middle. I get things around the house done that I didn’t have time or energy for before. I started trying my hand at various hobbies. Some have stuck, others have not. The wife and I already knew we could get along together as we had done so when I was laid off and before I got the job at age 58. NOTE: during that period I felt the same sort of edginess as I did when I finally retired. At that time I spent some time every day looking for and applying for jobs. I also was fed up with all the pine trees around my back yard so I started being an amateur lumberjack. I took down about 25 trees, cutting them up and stacking them. This was not an option when I retired as we had put up a fence as had all my neighbors and the pine trees were between the fences. sigh