I retired at 53 years old. I realise that's pretty young by normal standards. But I started planning it, financially at least, in my mid-thirties. When I hit 48, Excel informed me that I could stop working, but I didn't really listen until last year.
I was warned by well-meaning friends that I would be bored to death within weeks. Apparently I would soon lose all self esteem, and descend into deepest depression. But the thing is, I've never really had any issues with my self esteem, and after 32 years of working in a job categorised by our HR department as "exempt", I had a personal to-do list as long as your arm. "Exempt" means that you are not constrained by regular working hours - or in other words you work until you're exhausted, sleep where you drop, and then start working again. Every day for 32 years. I put a brave face on it, but if I'm honest with myself I would rather have been doing almost anything else.
For the sake of background, let me take a step back to when I was 36 years old. My company has a policy. When you hit 15 years seniority you sit down with two levels of management, and they either tell you that you are an invaluable employee who can look forward to a bright and rosy career, or that you aren't going anywhere and it would be best for all concerned if you wouldn't mind awfully submitting your resignation... immediately. If it's the former, they take away your lump sum payoff and convert it into pension rights (not something anyone really cares about at 36). In the latter case, you get the payoff, a limp handshake and an economy plane ticket home.
So this is obviously a fairly important watershed, and I prepared for the meeting by firing up Excel (a very old and basic version) and attempted to capture what I wanted out of life, and when I could expect it to happen. Slowly but surely the spreadsheet evolved and became quite sophisticated. I defined three lifestyle targets... survival, comfortable and luxurious. Actually that was the easy bit. The difficult bit was figuring out my wealth, and how it was likely to evolve over the next 20 years or so. But after 13 versions, I had a spreadsheet that I was proud of. It had six or seven sheets filled with various parameters and extremely complex equations, and it all distilled down to just 3 cells. A retirement date for each of the three targets I had defined.
The point of explaining this is to demonstrate that I have actually been pondering retirement every day since I was 36 years old! Seriously... every day I would get to work, immediately open up Yahoo finance, and diligently transcribe exchange rates and stock prices into my spreadsheet. After 10 minutes or so I would eagerly click on the sheet that would tell me if my retirement dates had got closer, or receded. If you're that analytical about your future, it's fairly obvious why the final decision was so easy to take. My spreadsheet made the decision, and I just did what I was told. How could I argue? It would be tantamount to admitting that I had wasted 10 minutes of every day for the last 17 years. It wasn't even an option!
I put it off for a few years by adjusting my targets, but eventually I couldn't think of anything else that I needed. What nudged me over the edge? It was fairly obvious actually. My spreadsheet told me how much I was earning after all the various deductions, and how much my pension would be worth. What I realised was that the difference between the two was shrinking fast. I was actually winning contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for my company, while clearing just a fraction above my pension for myself... not much more than if I quit and flipped burgers in MacDonalds! Maybe one day I'll write about the reaction I got from HR when I tried to explain this to them, but to cut a long story short I wrote a short resignation letter, slapped it on my bosses desk and told him where he could stick the job. He laughed - we'd been discussing it for months and he was surprised it had taken me so long!
The next step was to figure out what projects to take off the back burner. There was a lot more than I realised! In fact, far too many to tackle. Here are just a few...
- Lose weight and get fit. Put a check mark in this box. With my dear wife's help (she bought me a FitBit!) I have lost about 22kg. That's a fully laden large suitcase. I'm surprised that airlines actually to let me fly! I've now got my BMI down to 24.7, which is in the "healthy" range.
- Learn to cook better. Check this box as well. My recipe book is now bulging... just like my waistline used to! My panna cottas are superb, as are my ice creams and creme brulee. Pasta and bread have been mastered. Thai food is my specialty. Yum!
- Return to programming. Another check in the box. I've taught myself Objective-C and Python, and I'm writing apps for Mac OS and iOS. Also bought myself a Raspberry Pi, and I've still got plenty to do to master that.
- Improve my guitar playing. I've now got a Fender Telecaster to go with my Les Paul. Unfortunately, I just haven't had the time to spend on getting really good. Loads of room to improve.
- Get my golf handicap down to single figures. Major work in progress here. I didn't touch my clubs for 3 years while I was having problems with my toes, and my handicap has suffered badly as a result. But... we just joined a fantastic club in KL and we're getting good use out of it. Ask me this time next year...
- Learn to take decent photos. Well, I bought myself a nice camera but I'm still yet to master more than the basic automatic functions. Another one to try harder on.
- Read more books. I'm doing quite well here. I try to fit in half an hour of reading before going to bed every evening, and I'm slowing ploughing through the stack of books on my bedside table. Half a check mark in that box.
To finish this off, let me just relate a recent experience I had. I asked a friend of mine of similar age who has just retired, albeit not as voluntarily as I did, what his plans for the future were. He told me he was going on a long holiday, and then he might start looking for a job. I was a bit surprised at this answer, so I asked him why he would want to do that. He told me that he didn't really want to, but he just felt like he was too young to stop working. Almost like society expects you to work until you're old and grey.
Well, I refuse to follow that expectation. I've got twenty, maybe thirty years left and I will not waste the best of those years in an office generating wealth for other people. That valuable time is for me and my family, and I intend to savour every minute!
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