I Retired at 39. In Retrospect Here’s What I Didn’t Expect. Here’s What I Did Expect.

Get That Money is an exploration of the many ways we think about our finances — what we earn, what we have, and what we want. 

A lot of people think that early retirement is for spoiled, entitled millennials who think they’re too good to work, or for tech bros who make a ton of money. But I’m neither of those things, am a baby boomer. One of 76MM that will retire in the coming generations. I’m not even a millennial. More importantly, I was always excited to work. For most of my career, I was perfectly happy being totally committed to my job.

My career was in  consulting, chasing IT contracts around the world. I enjoyed my job and did well at it. But the farther up the ladder I got, the worse my lifestyle became. I got a number of promotions and suddenly, in my early 30s, was like, “Wait. we used to take all of these cool camping trips in the mountains, and now I can’t go backpacking in areas where my cell phone won’t work because I have to be reachable at all times.” Isn’t the idea that you’re supposed to achieve more to get a better lifestyle, not a worse one? It was like my work advancement came at the expense of the rest of my life.

Another factor was that job stress started weighing on my relationship with my wife and daughter JoAn and Kylee. I also have a genetic disability that’s progressive, and work was taking a toll on my physical health. My dad has the same thing, so does my mom - I know what it’s going to look like when I get older. I’m not thankful for this condition, but I am thankful for this visible reminder that I don’t have infinite time. I want to travel and ski and do all the things I dream of doing before I can’t move around with full mobility anymore and/or are mentally disabled. Another factor was that job stress started weighing on my relationship with my wife, JoAn. We realized that we were drifting apart bit by bit, and we were like, “We need to find a way to stop this. If we do this until we’re 67, what’s going to remain of our lives at that point? What’s going to remain of our marriage?” That’s when we got serious about retiring early. I was 32 at the time.

 

I stopped counting B'days at 39.

I stopped counting Birthdays at 39 yo and on (9/11) it'll be the 28th Anniversary of my 39th birthday.
I celebrate twice per year— my b'day and that of my patron Saint's — John (6/25) as is customary in my culture.

Retiring early isn’t just about saving up enough money, although that’s obviously a huge part. Although it's debatable, If you say save $1.5 MM, given taxes and inflation ( 3.5%/ year, over yr ) by the time you retire it's $0.50 on the dollar. Just by the companies I've worked with who put in an equivalent amount into my retirement account as I did, to say Social Security — $120K, over 50 years, let's say — if it was put into an avg. savings account of say 1.5% interest compounded monthly — I'd have 'bout $1.6MM saved up, by retirement. I can conceivably withdraw $40K a year— year over year, and it wouldn't deplete the funds, 'till I was 98 yo. ( I don't plan to be around by then.  My GR8-grandma & grandma died at 93 yo. ) Minimally, I'd get about half of the amount monthly, approx. $17K/ yr and my family ( JoAn & Kylee ) gets the rest. So I'm OWED about $20K owed https://infamousinfluential.blogspot.com/2019/10/are-you-owed-as-much-as-2344100.html

It’s also a huge emotional and ideological transition. And we don't exactly just retire, we do it in stages, we just find something else do do, in life you have on average six careers, I'm into my third. Besides, they want you to pass away standing up, are you kidding. I should be on the 9thgreen by now, but my daughter went back to school and some one has to pay the bills.  One big question I struggled with is, how can I be a Masculinism (feminism - that movement is centered on putting an end to all forms of discrimination on the basis of gender and related characteristics such as sexual orientation, and as such addressing discrimination of men is already within the scope of feminism) and believe we need more men and women leaders in the workplace, that are effective and then retire early and remove themselves from leadership roles? But once I started planning to leave, I got much better at helping other men and women at work because I stopped competing with them. I realized that I had gone through my career with this mindset that there can only be so many men and  women at the top, going through the glass ceiling, and I wanted to be one of them. In my final years at my job, I became a good advocate instead of just looking out for myself. In hindsight, I wish I’d done that my whole career, as a Commercial Artist & Photographer, Social Worker, and Computer Scientist ( and meld the three (3)  skillsets together, you get 'Industrial Design Engineer' ), but it’s certainly better late than never.

Ironically, engineering my exit from the workforce made me love my career so much more. It became much easier to shake off the dumb, day-to-day annoyances that used to stress me out. Because I had this fun secret — I was retiring and nobody knew — I had this new perspective. That made it harder to leave. The first person I told at work was my first boss and mentor, my plans to teach after work was done. Lucent Tech at the time offered to let me do it early and pick up the tab for the difference, between my engineering salary and teacher salary. I definitely had a couple of drinks first and then almost cried when I gave him the news at my performance review and semi-retirement dinner. And I laid it on thick saying, "It's been a honor and a privileged to serve, Sir!," But ultimately, I never second-guessed my choice to retire early, in part because JoAn, Kylee and I were both in it together and he didn’t have the same hesitation. Also, because of the silent killer,  a minor stroke (suffered at work) ...my body was hurting more, so the clock was ticking.

I stopped counting B'days at 39.

I stopped counting Birthdays at 39 yo and on ( 9/11 ) it'll be the 28th Anniversary of my 39th birthday. I celebrate twice per year — my b'day and my patron saint's — John ( 6/25 ) as is customary in my culture.

It took us about six years to save up for our retirement, and we were not starting from zero. I want to be very clear about that. We had retirement savings and home equity before we began the process. I don’t think most people can retire at 39 like I did, from Sperry Waltham MA - circa 1985 and they joined Burroughs and formed Unisys. What really helped us do it was that we moved from metro -- Nashua NH/ Boston MA area  to St Pete/Clearwater & Tampa/Orlando Fla, area which has a much lower cost of living. We bought a home there in 2011, when the housing market was in our favor, teleworked and telecommuted for years. And we’ve always been big savers, so it wasn’t a complete overhaul. If you’re used to living a M. Gemi or Manolo Blahnik lifestyle — the male equivalent of Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle ( From my earliest memories, I dreamt of living the life of a male equivalent of Carrie Bradshaw, the forever-young and outgoing “fashionista” from the award-winning book and television series “Sex and the City” by Candace Bushnell ) and then you’re like, “Okay, I’m only going to eat chicken, rice and beans from now on,” then yeah, that would be jarring and isolating, but that wasn’t the case for us. It also helped that I started a blog about what we were doing, Our Next Life, about four years ago, and found a community of people online with similar goals.

My blog becoming somewhat popular and ultimately could be leading to a book was a hobby albeit a total accident. I started it as a place to put things... things, concepts & ideas etc. I found somewhere so I'd know where, I'd found it.

 However, I now know that retirement would be very hard for me if I didn’t have them. I’ve always been ambitious, a self-starter, a gold-star seeker, a go getter and to go from a position at work where people asked for my opinion every day to having no one care — that would’ve been difficult. I want to feel important, feel desired and a sense of belongingness. Even though I’ve made peace with leaving my career, I think I will always have that deep need for people to value what I think and a sense of belonging, importance and ... Safety, belonging, and mattering are essential to your brain and your ability to perform at work, at home, and in life overall. 

In psychology, human needs have been popularized by the psychologist Abraham Maslow who stated that needs exist in a hierarchy. The needs listed by Maslow, starting from the most basics, are: physiologically, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, cognitive, and finally, the need for self actualization.

I do recognize the irony of turning my retirement into a new career for myself. People will say, “You write a blog so you’re not retired,” but I’ve made 'zero' dollars from it, relative to my life's work, by that time. I don’t even care if I get royalties from my book(s), courses or affiliates. The biggest thing I didn’t expect about retiring is that I’ve found I enjoy tasks that look like 'work.' They don’t feel like work because there’s no deadline — it's a passion of mine —  with the exception of perhaps the book, which had one deadline, but I had a great time writing it. I’m now pursuing public speaking, but only because It’s fun. It’s funny — I’ve realized that I actually like working. I’m wired to want to work. For a male member of society it defines who I am. I’m just not wired to live in our current work culture where I’m supposed to be excited to be connected at all times and a 'slave' to the corporate structure.

Some people feel it’s necessary to police whether those of us who say we are early retirees are actually retired or not. But I never pictured my retirement as endless Saturdays or for that matter Sundays. I think that’s a recipe for unhappiness and a very empty life. I still feel retired. I’m sure there are lots of people who would say, “That’s not retirement,” and if that’s what they think, fine. They can plan a different retirement for themselves. I do know a couple of early retirees who are perfectly happy playing video games all day. To me, that sounds so awful. Not that video games are bad, but I want to do things that I can look back on and feel like they added up to something and I made a contribution to society and can leave a legacy behind.

Another thing I didn’t expect about retirement was that JoAn and I had some rocky periods in our relationship in the last year. There’s this idea that work is the villain keeping you from having a good marriage, so if you take work away then your marriage will be perfect. That’s not true. I know some people whose early retirement exposed un-fixable ( citing irreconcilable differences ) challenges, or problems in their marriage, and made them realize that they wanted to do different things with their lives. A fair number of people do split up after they stop working.

I find that people love you for the benefits and 'till the benefits rub out, then move on. My wife sat me down and said, "I can't wait for you to die," Let me go while I'm still young. Let me do this!?"

JoAn and I have always been one of those couples who’s happy spending a lot of time together. But we’d always said, “Our dream is to be able to wake up in the morning and say, ‘What do we want to do today?’” And it turns out that we both had different interpretations of what that meant. For me, that was very literal — to wake up and say, “Hey, is it snowing? Is it sunny? Where are we? What should we do today?” But for JoAn, she’s more like, “What do we want to do this week?” She will fill up his calendar with mountain biking and community stuff, and I felt left out of that. We were each doing what we said we would do, but it turned out that wasn’t the same thing. We’ve been working through that.

Being retired while all our friends are still working hasn’t been that weird. It helps that we liveed for a while in a ski town in New Hampshire and know almost no one with a traditional work schedule. Now, we wake up between 8 and 9 a.m. or earlier, without an alarm clock almost every day, and I hope that never gets old. We have a long, leisurely breakfast unless there’s fresh snow and we’re trying to get out and ski or there's some warm water out on the beach or lagoon and we want to go boating or water sports. For many years we were always rushing to be on our phones and computers, first thing because we worked East Coast jobs and lived on the West Coast, or lived in one country (USA), worked in another (KSA, Kuwait/Iraq & Afghanistan) and vacationed in a third (Philippines), so we always felt behind when we woke up. I love that we don’t have to do that anymore.

After breakfast, I usually, check my smartphone, tablet and/or sit down at my computer for a bit and do some writing. Some days I’ll go skiing with JoAn, either on the powdered snow or water-ski, at Miami-beach, some days I won’t. At night, we usually watch a movie at the home theater on a boat, RV or our house. We almost always cook dinner from scratch, "Hello Fresh," instead of eating takeout and frozen food, like we used to. Sometimes go out, we used to do that every day, when working. We’re often planning our next trip, too. We were in France at the French Riviera for basically all of November and December. Sailed thru Grand Bahamas/ Nassau, Bimini & Bermuda island on our Catamaran during the Summer.

I can’t imagine feeling like I don’t have enough to do. I thought that once I retired I’d finally get caught up on email, but inbox zero is as elusive now as it ever was before. But I can very easily fill my days with reading, or putting together a puzzle, playing chess, backgammon or parcheesi or going for a hike, if I'm in town visiting my dad and,  mom and/or brother — the list of things to do is not hard to come up with. I miss my job even less than I expected, to be honest. Occasionally, I’ll have a moment on a Tuesday when I’m like, “Oh my gosh, everyone I know is working.” But that’s really it.

Inbox zero is as elusive now as it ever was before.

 

I haven’t experienced much resentment from people, which is a little surprising. We did get a little bit of, “Oh, you’re retired. That must be nice for you.” I actually retired before my mom and dad did. She and dad are still working because they made a series of bad decisions and was financially wiped out during the last financial bubble burst. Some of the same thing happened to us but we were diversified, we didn't have all our eggs in one basket. But I also think it’s important to acknowledge the role of luck, a stoke o' luck, class and privilege. Yes, we worked hard for this. Neither JoAn nor I came from any money. I was raised mostly by my grandma, a single parent who’s on a kindda disability. She owned a  farm or fazenda in Brava, Cape Verde Islands, Africa. But I still got so lucky in many ways. I had a full ride thru to college and graduated with very little debt, had a great career which ended, in a successful way,  for example.

I want to say I don’t get stressed out anymore, but there are always dumb little things to worry about, like our local postal service sucks and miss-delivers things all the time, people steal stuff, ID fraud is rampant. I'm guessing they like it better, than I did. Gotta distribute the wealth, sometimes. It’s mundane, but I spend a lot of time chasing down mail, which is annoying. And I do worry about health care constantly. If something happened to the Affordable Care Act and a ton of our budget suddenly had to go to health care, then that’ll be a challenge. But the flip side risk was that I spent all my healthy years working. Which is ultimately worse? You can’t get those healthy years back.