When To Retire?

For reasons to do with psychology, I found it hard to write about the process of deciding to retire. So I'm going to backtrack a little. Google "when should I retire" and most of the answers are about having enough investments and income. If you really like your job and the people you work with, you should probably not leave just yet. Seems like a sensible comment.

Assume the money thing is sorted. (That's another subject.)

Did I like my job? Like / dislike had nothing to do with it. Sometime in the Winter of 20/21, I checked out of the job. Checking out is its own thing (discussion to follow). Did I like the people? Sure. Am I going to miss them? Not so much that I'd notice. Work colleagues are not friends.

I can keep myself occupied and am happy with my own company. I'm not going to start drinking and over-eating. I might start sleeping in, but by my standards that would be 07:30. So that's okay.

My life expectancy is 85. But I'm not so sure. I spent twenty years smoking and drinking with unreasonable gusto. There's a lot of longevity on my mother's side of the family, not so much on my father's. He died at 65 of stomach cancer. I'm already older than my father when he died.

I'd like to do some stuff while I can still walk for a whole day.

It would be incredibly easy to stop WFH and take my house back for myself...

...never to answer another question that needs some tortuous SQL-bashing...

...never to have to work my way round the damn bureaucracy again.

That's why I was irritated when people want me to think about it.

Either that, or increased irritability is a by-product of The Jab.

(Actually, we should blame everything on the jab. I swear that my voice has acquired a slight croak, and remembering names can be a real stumper.)

One thought I picked up from the dross that is so often the result of a Google search:  you have a sense that you would regret continuing to work full time if you did it for much longer.

In the five minutes after reading that, I thought:

Yes I would regret it. I really can't see me working-from-home past about September 2021. So I'm really worrying about which exact month between now and September will be my last paycheque. Frankly, I may as well leave that to serendipity. And not hang on for the last paycheque.

So I went from September to filling in the forms at the start of April with a month's notice. Bang!

And never had a moment's doubt.