100 Day Mark Thoughts
This is kind of long so bear with me. I have been retired 100 days and I thought I would take time to examine and share what has happened. Rather than break it down on a day by day basis, I am going to break it down by subject.
100 days leading up to retirement: Being a senior level engineer definitely didn’t give me a lot of time to ponder the wheres and whyfores of retirement. I knew there were very few people that hadn’t retired by my age, and that was concerning to me. I however loved what I did. But the thing that clenched it for me was the untimely death of a sibling of an immediate family member (by marriage). That suddenly put it into perspective that I was not going to get any younger, so I put in for retirement. As my retirement date approached, I became more and more stressed since I was trying to complete not only tasks assigned to me, but completion goals that I had set for myself as well. One thing that saved my bacon was that my laptop was taken from me early the last day of work. So I had a chance to look up and see where I was. I also had some very good friends that I had worked with set up a few things to celebrate. So the last day was very refreshing.
Stress: The stress of meeting schedules while juggling lots of tasks at the same time definitely has lessened for me since I retired. I know this because I no longer wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what I have to do at work the next morning. To say this is refreshing is an understatement. I still have some moments when the stress kicks in (did I do the right thing, will I survive, etc.) but this is becoming less and less. I am giving myself at least 6 months to a year to get over stress completely.
Finances: I have spent a good portion of these 100 days working the finance angle. I did have a budget before retiring and sort of followed it, but I am now careful to know where every penny is going. In fact, I have used what I know about finances to set up a double entry bookkeeping system to keep track of my money and my budget at the same time. I have fully implemented the “You Need A Budget (YNAB)” shtick to plan for current and out year spending. I have also put together spreadsheets to project where our finances are heading, so I can play what if games with it. I started the projections spreadsheet early before I retired and just continued updating it with the latest figures. I suppose that I will be tracking it very close for at least a year before my mind will accept that everything is going to work out.
Friendships: Interestingly, I still occasionally meet with people from work, generally in a lunch setting so as to not invade their time with family. I have also developed a good friendship with other members of the family, including time on a regular basis to talk and exercise together. I am starting to think of setting up a regular schedule for lunch with some of the people that I have worked with.
General daily activities: I find that I get up quite early, generally because my wife gets up early. My first activity is to exercise, then shower, and eat breakfast. From there it varies depending on what I have on my personal to do list. I find that I don’t spend a lot of continuous time on any one thing. That is probably by design since I get bored easily. So I am taking the tact of working one thing for a short time, then switching gears to something else entirely; then I might come back to the first thing. I am now realizing that I do have time to complete things but at my discretion. This is considerably different from when I was workin, because I was generally too tired to do anything when I got home from work. The weekends were always go go go to get things done before going back to work on Monday. So there has been a definite change in the push level.
Retirement subject list: I am surprised to report that I am now reading a lot. It’s still mostly technical articles and books, but I find that I now have time to catch up on technical subjects that I didn’t have when I was working. I have continued with several of my hobbies that I had prior to retiring. I have added one item from my list, wood carving, which I find to be very relaxing. I’m not very good at it, but with practice I will do better. I still haven’t had the time to travel like I wanted to because of COVID, and I haven’t been back to the gym for the same reason. However, I keep up the exercise using a weight bench, weights, treadmill, and rowing machine; so I still stay active.
Structure: Retirement has all the appearance of not having structure, but in reality it does. The difference is that you have the opportunity to choose what you concentrate on at any one moment.