Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Sometimes inertia is enough to keep a company going.  It might not be as efficient as it could be, but just the momentum behind it, can keep it profitable and operating.

State and Federal funds keep my company going.  We're completely immune to the natural market forces of supply and demand, kind of like the Musk companies Brad was talking about on another thread.  

Taxpayer dollars and student loans can get binned under "inertia," I suppose.  

My Dad is taking a well-deserved and overdue summer vacation to Poland. He is visiting numerous cousins on his mother’s side, who he’s seeing in person, in their same farming villages where he can speak his native language, for the first time since the 1970s before leaving Poland for good. In photos he messages us brothers (his sons), he appears unusually relaxed, which plays into my prediction that he’ll return home, and to his job with Maricopa County, wishing he’d started visiting Poland years ago, beginning after my Mom passed away in 2013.

Instead, he’s kept himself too tied up with work to take lengthier overseas trips, and now, still working at 75 years, with zero financial need to continue working, I’m convinced that he works until he passes away one day. He says “work keeps me going” but, as with my late Mom’s addiction to Percocet, I suspect work will be the drug that keeps him alive until it does him in at the end. 

I cannot relate to why anybody would want to keep working when they no longer need to. If it’s about maintaining a personal identity, there are many ways outside of work to build identity. If Covid lockdowns did me any good, it was realizing how fully capable I am to develop a sense of productivity/accomplishment on my own. When my employer sidelined their workforce for about four months and left us to ourselves through the summer of 2020, the routine I created for myself tapped into a sense of productivity/accomplishment that I thought I’d otherwise lose during months without work or a routine that included gyms (closed) or meeting with friends.

Over the past decade, we’ve addressed with our Dad whether he’ll ever retire, and it’s mostly a directionless discussion. But a few months ago, when I was telling him about the sudden passing of an older coworker who retired a few years ago, my Dad’s response gave me an idea of why he continues to work. True or not, he responded by saying “most men die within a few years after they retire.” It’s a disquieting view into his reasoning: he’s afraid that once he stops working it’ll speed up the clock on the inevitable. The inevitable comes for all of us, yes, but I find his approach slightly tragic.

Trying to work through some ish here...

You all know my history. Wiped out financially by divorce in 2016. Been spending the last decade trying to build myself just to "ok", while feeling like I was way behind my goals and worried I'd be unable to support myself in the manner I'd like to when I retire. Then good luck came, and now I'm thinking that I might be able to retire a lot younger than 65.

Optimistically, if things stay good in the market, with my job (and my company's stock value for vesting), I could see myself getting out in 5 years. That'll mark the point at which my daughter graduates HS, I'll be completely free of child support (so I won't have my ex thinking I'm a piggy bank because I retired), and I'd be in my early 50s. I think to hit my early retirement "number", I doubt I could do it before then without more really good luck / stock market run.

More realistically, the number might be closer to 9 years, when she would be graduating college, and I'd be in my mid-50s.

But... Now that I have moved from "I hope I can afford to retire?" to "when will I reach my early retirement number?", I find myself thinking about retirement constantly.

It's not that I hate my job... In fact, my job is intellectually stimulating and I really feel like I'm doing something meaningful and impactful. I'm a little overwhelmed b/c my role changed 6 months ago and I'm just finding my feet, but I think that'll work itself out over the rest of this year.

So it's not that I'm miserable--it's that I'm constantly thinking of all the things I don't have time to do, that I'll have time to do.

• I've got bumpers for the Jeep that I've had since Christmas and haven't installed. I have other Jeep wrenching projects planned too but obviously I'm not going to start thinking about those until I do what I have in front of me. And hell, it would be nice to actually have the time to take the Jeep off road instead of just making it look tough.
• I've wanted to build a table for my kamado grills for years, but haven't gotten around to it.
• I haven't brewed in months.
• My wife and I buy all these cookbooks and print recipes constantly, but during the work week default to "easier" meals when I'd love to be cooking something interesting.
• I've been so overwhelmed at work that I've let the exercise fall off, which I need to correct but I feel like I never even have the time for that.
• I'd like to actually play golf more than once every two weeks as well as put a little bit of time into my game.
• And the most important--we have the means to travel but we never have the time / freedom.

Between work, kids, general upkeep of the basic aspects of being a functional adult, we're too tired to truly make use of our weekends so it seems like a constant hamster wheel of recharging just enough on weekends to get through the week. It's making time for all the "I have to" stuff and having very little for the "I want to" stuff.

Don't get me wrong... We've got a great life and I'm not complaining. But now I see this possible future that's tantalizingly within reach, but at the same time it's going to require patience because it's not here yet.

I spent the weekend with my dad. He kinda let himself go [and was very depressed] when my mom passed this spring, wasn't great about taking his meds, ended up gaining 40 lbs of water weight and ended up in the hospital, and now is at least recovering and hopefully will get back to self-sufficiency in a few weeks. But I know that he was never in a good position financially, to the point that when he was retired from being an architect was selling insurance... He's gotten into woodworking, sculpture, and is really talented and great at it, but he always felt guilty leaving my mom for more than an hour or two to go to the wood shop. When she passed he said all the right things about all the things he wanted to do, and he ended up here. Now he's finally got the time to do some stuff, but at 84 and in his physical condition, will he have the physical ability? That's not where I want to be in ~40 years, should I live that long, lamenting all the things I didn't do when I was physically able, but now can't do. 

Does anyone else ever feel like this? I actually like my job, but my job isn't--or at least shouldn't be--my identity. It's a means to an end. The end is in sight, but it's not here, which just makes me want it more.

I think what's most important is to figure out exactly what you want to do in retirement.

I really have not done that yet, so I still work.

One other thing to think about is health. Good health is not guaranteed, regardless of how good you feel today.

My wife is an example. She is healthier than most horses, and one day breast cancer shows up. Thankfully, the surgeon got it all, but as we all know (or should know), cancer ALWAYS comes back.

One other thing to think about is health. Good health is not guaranteed, regardless of how good you feel today.

My wife is an example. She is healthier than most horses, and one day breast cancer shows up. Thankfully, the surgeon got it all, but as we all know (or should know), cancer ALWAYS comes back.

It is a concern...

Right now we've got AMAZING health insurance through my job... One of the benefits of working at a large multinational tech firm. I'm sure your wife had the same at Baxter. 

But once we retire, it's ACA until 65 when we can get onto Medicare. And I don't know how much protection that affords us from massive medical bills if something happens. 

Health Ins is one of the reasons I'm still working full-time - until 65

a year from now I will look into scaling back to part-time & Medicare

Health insurance was my wife's big concern about retiring.  Took a couple of years but convinced her we could afford to pay. Been retired for 2 years and she still has 3 more years until medicare. We would have given up a lot of adventures in the past 2 years and many more over the next 3 years if we waited. And who knows how healthy we will be.