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What does “Retire Early” mean to us?

My boss’ boss retired last year. At his “there’s free cake in the conference room” retirement celebration, I asked him what he had planned. His response surprised me. “I don’t really have anything planned. I’m just going to be open to what the universe has for me.” Wow. This couldn’t be farther from my approach.

It’s not that I hate my job and am counting down the days (well, maybe I am counting now), but I know there is so much more beyond my last day in the cubicle. Beyond the two weeks of vacation. Beyond the Monday mornings or the staff meetings. Beyond the water cooler. To have worked a 40+ year career and to depart into retirement without a plan blew my mind. 

What’s my early retirement plan?

This is a great question and the answer is different for each person. I suppose “being open to what the universe has for you” is one extreme.

To us, early retirement simply means escaping the rat race to live remarkable, unconventional lives to be of impact to our kids and this world.

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For some, that could mean sitting on a beach, but outside of intentional vacation time, we are not beach sitters. We are doers. Our flavor of early retirement looks like an epic family adventure (made possible by not having to show up at a cubicle on Monday morning).

The word “retirement” means different things to different people. There are as many opinions on this as there are bloggers writing about it. Here are a few thoughts about what retirement looks like for us.

Will we ever work another day in our lives again?

Yes. We’ll just do it on our terms. Early retirement doesn’t mean we will live only on our 401k balance. We’ll work, we’ll just do it on our terms and not under the pressure of having to work because we’re trapped.

How early is early?

Again, early means different things to everyone. Is early before 72? 65? 59 ½? In your 30’s?

For us, we intend to retire from my 24-year career as a chemical engineer when I am 46. My original plan, for about the last 15 years, was to work until our kids were through college (when I’d be 56), so 46 is a decade earlier than even that early. That’s what early means to us.

What will we do with our time?

Many people have an image of retirement that looks a lot like a beach vacation that lasts forever. For us, if you’ve been reading this site for more than a few minutes, you know about our plan for our first year of early retirement. We plan to do the Great Loop as a family. When we return, we intend to settle into retirement jobs, side hustles, passion projects, and volunteer work.

Right now, I operate in a time constraint. I work eight-to-five, Monday through Friday with the exception of a couple of weeks of vacation each year. This leaves me evenings and weekends to side hustle and adventure as a family. It doesn’t leave much time for saying “YES” to things that present themselves and if I do say “YES” to something it usually comes at the expense of something else I would spend time on.

Early retirement to me means having the time freedom to finally say yes to those things without dropping something else. YES I can help you move, YES I can attend your party, YES I can volunteer for that, YES, I can grab coffee with you. Currently, I guard my evening and weekend time to keep it for me and my family and am I greedy with it. I really seek to be generous with my time in retirement.

What is a “retirement job?” Isn’t that an oxymoron?

I want to retire from a “day job.” A retirement job to me is anything that is not that. It wouldn’t involve a cubicle, an eight-to-five schedule, 10 days of PTO a year, hours of meetings, or TPS reports. On the side I’m a boat captain. I love the water. I may give boat tours in my early retirement. That doesn’t mean I’m “not retired.” I may drive a school bus. The school district has great benefits (which would help us retire even earlier by CoastFI), lots of holidays off, not too many hours a day, you get summers off to adventure, and they have great health insurance.

I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I may start a side hustle I haven’t even thought of yet. My wife has worked a variety of side jobs for over a decade since our daughter was born. She finds work she’s interested in or work finds her. She also doesn’t mind (and may actually thrive on) moving back into a more traditional eight-to-five role at some point. Lately, she’s been more immersed in homeschool and childhood education and charity/volunteer types of projects which may turn into a retirement job for her.

One thing is for sure: I don’t anticipate a boomerang back into my current profession. However, I’m too practical to ever rule that out completely. I’ve seen it too many times in my career that it would be naïve to think it couldn’t happen to me – folks in my industry who have the financial resources and could retire or those who have pulled the trigger and actually retired frequently re-enter the workforce. Some have legit reasons, like an unexpected expense that working “just a few more years” will clear up. But mostly I have observed that they that had no concrete plans other than maybe taking an extended vacation who can’t adjust to retired life, are bored, or their spouse gets frustrated with them and sends them back to work to get them out of the house.

I just don’t see myself ever getting bored or needing to boomerang. That’s just not how I am programmed. And as for not having a plan, how about this:

Our early retirement will have phases and change as we go.

1.  Our first year is the Great Loop boat adventure.
2. Years 2-3 will be finishing our oldest child’s high school years (homeschool) and preparing to launch her to college.
3. Years 4-6 will be wrapping up high school for our son.
4. In years 7-10, we will be empty nesters with both kids in college.
5. After that (or maybe earlier), we’re probably ready to downsize from a family sized home to begin looking a little more like a stereotypical retired couple. We should have the hang of it by then.

There’s a little about what we think early retirement looks like for us. “Early” to us means retiring at 46 years old. Although the word “retirement” means different things to different people, ours will probably involve work in some capacity, just not an eight-to-five cubicle job. It will have phases and change as we go, but this is our plan for now. Beyond that, we’ll just have to “see what the universe has for us.” 😊