Occam's Razor

Deciding to retire so far has been all about getting our financial ducks in a row. I’ve been doing this for many years. The 401K seems to be large enough. The pension looks generous enough. Our liabilities are paired down: just $35,000 remains on the mortgage, our last debt. The daughter has graduated college and thanks to us does so debt free. Today she cemented a job that looks like it will at least be reasonably interesting, tangentially related to her degree, and which pays a decent wage (with benefits). Our financial adviser is pondering my last questions about whether to announce my early retirement. The gun is loaded and my thumb is on the trigger.

I had told my boss of the moment, Dane, that I planned to retire next year. I wanted to leave with everything neat and tidy, and I figured I needed about a year to do this. It’s the engineer and the professional in me. Now, I just don’t want to wait that long. It’s increasingly clear to me that leaving things neat and tidy can’t happen. There is too much organizational change going on. Still, it’s hard for me to put my finger on a primary reason I want to retire soon. There are lots of little reasons, though, even though I am only 57.

Unquestionably, I am tired of doing my current job. I realize I peaked a few years ago. Although I met my professional goals there was never a time to rest on my laurels. It’s just more of the often frustrating business of managing people and trying to do so with increasingly smaller resources. Management and supervision pay well, but the responsibility can be crushing and you rarely make people happy. That’s because if you are doing your job right, you are instituting change, and people naturally resist change. You have to coax them, and it works for a while, but not forever.

So you figure if you want to work, it would be nice to do something you enjoy more without losing your standard of living. With retirement of course, you don’t have to work, but if you do, you have the option of something that is more part time and pays less per hour. For me that probably means doing programming again because I sure don’t want to do more management. In any event, while I greatly admire everyone who works for me, we still often rub each other the wrong way. It’s too much time together. It’s thousands of conference calls and Webex sessions over ten years. Frankly, a lot of it is due to knowing people too well, and telecommuting often exacerbates it. I figure I’ll like them a whole lot better when I no longer have a power relationship with them, and see them a lot less, like at holiday parties. They might appreciate me more too. I am sure I wasn’t the most pleasant boss or leader at times. Distance may bring us both perspective.

It will be a pleasure to forget the details of my job. Every domain is full of domain details that only make sense to those who inhabit that world. My passion is information technology; my domain is hydrology. It’s the water domain with its myriad parameters and the thousands of electronic pathways and processes that we created to bring science to the public that feels overwhelming. It takes years to be proficient where I work, not because of the technology, but because the domain is so deep that gaining proficiency resembles a medieval apprenticeship. It will be a pleasure to unload the responsibility of worrying about release agreements. I won’t have to fret about people I manage who are also about my age also about ready to retire, full of domain knowledge, but with few coming through the ranks to replace them. Republicans have decreed that government must be smaller, and in the process they are cutting the legs out from the people who must carry the organization into the future. It is so penny-wise and so recklessly pound-foolish. But soon it will also be someone else’s problem: someone likely younger, with more energy, ready to make their mark on the world, and who will hopefully build on top of the infrastructure that my team and I spent ten years working on, but never fully completed.

A lot of people are retiring in my agency. The new leadership has come in with bold ideas for the future that may work or may not. One thing is for sure: it’s not the same place. The workforce is older and smaller; the offices are mostly vacant and quiet and the office feels more like a tomb than a workplace. It whispers to me: it’s time to leave.

Yet I still wonder if retirement will actually agree with me. There is no way to know until I try it. While I won’t have my somewhat lofty position and its status, I will have freedom again. I will move from something of a minor somebody to a nobody again: Joe Citizen with time on his hands.

It’s not too hard to see my future. The future most likely includes relocation, more my wife’s idea than mine, but now I feel vested in it. We hope it will be in 2015 and it will probably be the Pioneer Valley in central Massachusetts. It’s not hard to see many cruises in our future, and vacations in Europe and elsewhere. We tend to be cat people, but somehow I see a dog in my future. This is because I’ll want to get outside a lot, and I’ll want companionship, and it probably won’t be with my spouse due to her host of medical issues. I’ll also want it because I sense I’ll want some space. Just as coworkers, however nice, can be grating when they are so often in your face, a spouse in your face 24/7 can be grating as well. So I can see working part time, consulting probably in an office in my future residence, but perhaps teaching at a local community college, largely just to be somewhere else for a part of my day. I see daily hikes around Mount Tom near Northampton, Massachusetts. I imagine myself exercising at the local gym. I picture myself attending the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence Massachusetts.

But when? Likely formal retirement won’t wait until in May 2015, my original plan. Now I am thinking I will retire this summer. I won’t leave things neat and tidy for whoever fills my slot, but I will leave with our release agreement largely accomplished and with all software tested, released and stable. I feel some responsibility to bring to a close the major activities I started. But I can’t wait that much longer. I am restless. I want to walk through that retirement door, even if it means a slightly smaller pension. I’d rather buy a year of leisure instead. I will be grateful to be able to retire so early, and have what I hope are many good years ahead of me.

Because I know it’s going to be a one-way door. The last door is the one where you exit this life. This new room will have many chambers, but it really only has one exit. The challenge will be to make the most of the time ahead of me and to do so happily and with gratitude for having the time to enjoy more of life. I just need the courage to pull that trigger.

Soon. Very soon I expect to be filing the retirement paperwork. I first want to hear from my financial adviser.