Congrats Teach!!
Congratulations.
I retired at 62 and I've been loving it.
I can't imagine going back to work though...
A good friend of mine, and former boss, is 66 and still works, even though he has plenty of money/retirement. I asked him why hasn’t he retired yet and he told me there’s a certain satisfaction with knowing you can tell the company to kiss your ass anytime you want to and not suffer financially one single bit.
Yeah... I know exactly what you mean. I could have retired at 60 instead of 62, but I wanted to stay on and finish a big project that I started rebuilding a power plant in Georgia. I also wanted to train my replacement which was a guy I had know since he was 18 years old. For the last two years I was basically a consultant and just advised other people that worked for me. It was a nice finish to a long career.
I would have kept working too. I loved my job, I loved the people that worked for me, I loved the people I worked for, I loved my "customers" at all the power plants and I loved my company. They were all very good to me and very good to work with. My problem was that I took a lot of pride in my job and I never realized until I retired just how much pressure I put on myself to succeed and to make sure that all the projects I managed and all the work we did was done with the highest level of expertise that we could provide. I was just so used to operating that way, that I never realized how much pressure it was.
I met a guy fishing on the beach the other day and we got to talking. I told him I had retired about 3 years ago at 62. He told me he retired at 59. I said, "It's nice to be free isn't it." Then he went on to say that he mows the fairways at Kiva Dunes a few days a week and about 4 or 5 days a week he works down at the Fort Morgan Marina. I didn't say anything, but in my mind I was thinking, "Well... If your still working, then that's not really retired."
Lots of guys that worked for our company would retire, have the big party, all that, and then a few months later I would see them in the break room and they would have on a "Contractor's Badge" and I would go, "I thought you retired." they would usually tell me they got bored and came back to work. Tons of guys did that. The money coming back as a contractor was really good money, but you had to wait like 9 months to come back as a contractor.
At my retirement party, one of the Vice-Presidents was there and she knew me really well, we were friends, they were all going around the room telling funny stories about stuff I did at work and she laughs and says, "We'll see you in 9 months Mark!" I laughed even harder and said, "No you won't either."
