Anyone not want to retire?

Whenever asked my answer is "I haven't worked a day in my life". :B Well OK, with maybe one exception - the summer before university when I worked in a carbon processing plant and realized I was going to have to find a career doing something I truly enjoyed. That I did, for 45 years ... I still get together with former colleagues from time to time and to a person we all agree - "Still can't believe we actually got paid to do what we did!" The 2008 recession finally had such an impact on the television production business that by 2011 it became obvious the world had changed forever, our terrific "ride" was finally over, and it was time to hang up the skates. Talk about dumb luck though, not more than two months later I was back working again, part time, seasonal, ~ 20 hrs a week, in a totally different business but with the same camaraderie, respect for colleagues, and a respect for work ethic I had previously enjoyed for so many decades. My wife has her own career, just got another promotion, still has another few years to retirement so for now I have no plans to stop working and "fully" retire. Yes, I've had to deal with life's "ups and downs" as does everyone else but in the overall scheme of things I feel truly fortunate to have had the opportunity of such a rewarding career, yet at the same time feel sad for what appears to be the majority of people who say they just can't wait to retire, the sooner the better. I guess somebody's gotta do it but it's a heck of a way to live one's life. :R

Nice reading this thread, hearing lotsa folks' thoughts on retirement.

A couple of stories about my Dad. When he retired, he told me that he walked into work one day and it was like a light switch. One day he was loving work, the next day, he felt he had to get out. When he told me that, I was in my late 30's and I thought to myself "I love what I do so much, that will never happen to me." Well it did, just the same way he said it happened to him. I was in a meeting with a customer one day and the words stopped meaning anything, all I heard was "blah blah blah...)

The other story he told me was 5-6 years after he retired, he said "I'm so busy now, I don't know how I ever had time to work!" I retired last month at age 64 and I still sorta feel like I am just taking a day off and have to go back tomorrow. DW is still working, so the big things will have to wait til she is able to be with me more.

Chuck

I'm 38 and can't wait to retire. As soon as the kids are out of the house so am I, but we're a ways off now.

I retired at age 56. I loved it,did what I wanted,when I wanted. Wife retired 2 years later,I loved having her home,we did what she wanted when she wanted. I love her to bits, but 24/7 togetherness for ever is just a bit to much. I found a job about 2 months ago, I work between 20 and 30 hours a week and so far it is working ok. My marital bliss is back!

When people ask me how is retirement, I tell them it was tough at first, but after 5 mins I got used to it :)

I got to retire a few years early, this March at 63. I saved every penny since the kids left and the market improvement made it all possible. 39 years at commercial HVAC&R and I always thought I'd make it to 66 but that trade is way too brutal in Az.. Lots of aches and pain and trips to the chiropractor and PT. I was a dedicated workaholic and I was so afraid I'd wake up on the first morning of retirement and say... Ahhh sh!t why on earth did I retire so soon? That didn't happen, I woke up happier than I've been for a LONG time! Now, a friend wants me to come back and run new installs for him (contract work) at the same h@ll hole I retired from and I'm going to try it and see if working for a totally different mgnt. team is less brain damage. Craig

About 1/4 of my career was in a service truck dealing with the public and I enjoyed making customers happy and keeping them for many years. The rest of the years was doing large commercial/manufacturing/industrial plant work, for huge corps and dealing with stupid, clueless mngt who knew nothing about the trade. I'm soooo happy that's history! Craig

I worked with the public most all my life mostly in automotive service. Everybody wanted everything for nothing...Had enough people swear at me to last a couple lifetimes. When I hit 61 and had a few bucks tucked away I left. If I had know retirement was this good I would have never worked! A friend once said "You'll run out of time before you run out of money" He died at about age 70 with plenty of money left behind....

B.O.

For a while both DW and I traveled a lot for business. I used to joke that we only spent 5 of our first 7 married years together. And maybe because of all that business travel I never moved further than 30 miles away from where I grew up in Southern California (DW spent 2 years back East).

So I don't remember exactly how we came to the decision that we'd leave California for retirement, but it became a goal and we started our list of criteria. We even made a trip to an active 55+ community (while about 10 years too young) and did a couple night test stay while checking out their amenities and the surrounding area.

I still thought we had some scouting trips needed almost 4 years ago when my DW pulled me aside and asked "why not now?" I'm currently working in retail, so that's a very portable skill. And DW knew our target city had a facility trying to mimic what her current employer was doing. So we thought we could move and test-drive our retirement destination while still working for an uncertain number of additional years.

Because we had not treated our previous house like some sort of ATM, and we'd been in it since the mid-90's downturn, we had serious equity even in late 2011 and early 2012. We put it on the market in December 2011 and closed escrow in March 2012.

We bought annual passes for our National Parks and for the Utah State Parks and started exploring our new home base for a couple of years. Last year we added the TT to the mix and could not be happier.

We're both working about 36 hours per week, and during camping season I can take every other weekend off starting at 1pm on Fridays. I don't know when retirement will come, but everything we've done in the last 3+ years has reaffirmed our need/desire to have a real life outside our careers.

I retired this past Friday at age 62, one of the toughest decisions I ever made.
I had worked in the same place for 41 years and loved my work, the people I worked with also. Yet there were things I wanted to do that just couldn't do working. Now after only a few days I know I made the correct choice. Now we can go camping whenever we want rather than when we were off work. Leaving Monday for a weeks camping trip.

I'm a little late on this one but here is my take on retirement, I got out of the Navy, got married about 18 months later, got a secure job in local government, worked for 32.913 years there starting as an electrical apprentice, rose as high as I could in my field, during that time I graduated from college with a degree in Management and it came in handy as an electrical supervisor.

I was sitting in my office one day reviewing a proposed change in our procedures manual and realized, I was out of date. I went to the computer and calculated my expected retirement salary and decided that we could live on that as long as the DW kept working, figured if she retired, we would have to sell one of our properties.

My 55th birthday happened to be a month away and it also was the day the pay period ended and a day before Habitat For Humanity started a 22 house project in South Los Angeles. I filed for retirement, that same day. It will be 20 years in 21 days and I am glad I did it, my job was eliminated about seven years ago. A big group of us get together a few times a year and find out who has died, lost their job and all that other stuff I'm avoiding.

I don't miss the work at all and we were lucky to have some good investments a great retirement plan that lasted up until 65 and Medicare kicked in and now with the fees we will have to pay on our Cadillac health plans we paying more for our healthedare. It's still better than being old and not up on all the technical stuff, now I'm just old and seeing the country.