One of my grandmother's friends, a gentleman in his 90s now, has been retired for over 50 of those years. He has achieved quite a lot in his retirement including several trips around the world in his home-made yacht. Not bad for a guy who was working the floor of a Ford plant.
Basically one day Ford decided to close the plant. He had started working there as a labourer at age 15, and worked his way up to a manager of a small team (something to do with inventory, can't quite remember the details) over the next 20-odd years. Everyone was to be paid severance as a lump sum, and you could take it as company stock, or cash, or as a combination of both.
Everyone he can remember speaking to was taking cash. Meanwhile he had been participating in the employee share program for a few years on the advice of a mentor and knew Ford shares were paying a decent dividend. He also realised that his prospects for finding work again were not great, and the entire industry was in a state of flux. He did some calculations (it helped that his home was paid off) and realised that if he got the lump sum as shares and adjusted his expenditure then he would never have to work again in his life.
Which is exactly what he did. He has continued to increase his holding in Ford over the decades and now receives more in dividends than he can possibly spend in a year. He built a yacht and has sailed around the world several times. He tells the story about how people say you need to be rich in order to own a yacht, but for him he found that after several months living at sea with no way to watch his investments he always returned much richer than when he set sail.
Obviously this is not the perfect plan but his investment has performed its function over the decades and he has weathered a lot of change.
