Retirement Part l Early Retirement is not just Unemployment by Another Name
One of the mental shifts I had to make was complete shift away from the work mindset. Retirement is not just unemployment just with another name. Figuratively speaking this meant one must put away their work tools never to be taken out again. For me this meant cancelling my membership in MELTA (Munich English Teachers Association) giving away all my books and materials that I had collected over the years and even deleting all my listening CD back ups I had! It also meant no longer checking the jobs section of TT (expat forum) or occasionally touching base with local schools to see if they needed a teacher. While I hadn’t been working much in the past few years I was still looking for work. Just the other day I stopped by the local Aldi and saw an ad for part time help and the first thing that crossed my mind was hmmm this would be a good job but then I said wait a minute I’m retired.
I think the hardest part is that it will be a few years before my wife will join me. This was a conscious choice we made back in the summer when the company was restructuring and offering some very generous buyouts to anyone willing to leave. Ran the numbers and it was doable. We talked about the pro and cons of each, the idea of every day being a Saturday. The joy of never having to set an alarm again vs the fact that there would be less bandwidth in the budget. To me that was to me the deciding factor. Arebelspy touched on this subject in another thread, can’t find the exact quote but the gist was that you can recover from a market crash but it’s much harder to recover lost purchasing power. That was my big concern, the unplanned expenses. Would we have the bandwidth to go home when we got that inevitable phone call - her parents are older and not in good health. Would we have been able to comfortable swing major dental or medical costs (nearly 15,000 worth this year).What about travel, we are now in a position where we can travel to our hearts content and stay at nicer places - no more couch surfing for us. Yes we talked about becoming nomads and travelling the world but after spending 7 years as consultants neither of us were terribly thrilled with the idea. My wife said that she was OK with working a few more years, it’s not that bad and to be honest pretty good. Both decided that the next restructuring (she figures five years hence) we'll look at it again
On the other hand when the alarm goes off on a Monday morning......
