Thoughts about retirement...

I retired when I was 50. I'm frugal and value my own time more than material wealth like fancy cars or a big house. My house was paid off when I was in my mid 30's and stayed out of debt after that.

The way I look at this is, the only finite resource we have is how long we have on this planet. Trading that by working to buy material things, always seemed like a bad deal to me. YMMV

Your approach and timing is a mirror of mine. Success guaranteed.
 
Retirement would horrify me.
Curious, I don't understand.
I enjoy designing, debugging hardware/software systems to fiil my time.
That's what you do in retirement.
The thought of being forced into a retirement home would finish me.
I think I'm beginning to see the problem. You're mixing things up.
Just slowly rotting away cant be much fun.
That's why I plan to rot extremely quickly. That'll be after I am retired for a while and can't chase them around the dance floor like I used to.

I have my retirement in order.
Enough money - :checked:
RV unit - :checked:
Loads of Avion points - :checked:
Young thinking wife - :checked:
Ability to adapt - :checked:
Desire to explore - :checked:
Youthful mind - :checked:
Youthful body - (Uh, how did this get here?)
Good health - (Uh again, who's writing this stuff?)
 
I meant retiring and then sitting rotting watching TV all day.
Well that's just doing it wrong isn't it?
The designing etc is my self employment so not a retirement activity.
Stop calling it employment and begin to enjoy your 'retirement'.
Why not get paid for what you enjoy doing ?
That's why I became a Gigolo.
 
The $64k question is whether it pays $64k, or somewhat less. I guess you *could* call it self employment if it’s paying ALL your bills. I’my skeptical, if you’re also complaining about how little you’ve sold lately.

Would I expect to “get paid” any time I drag my speakers out somewhere to DJ a gig? Sure. Will the total amount received in a year pay the utilities, insurance, taxes, and buy food, and put aside $24500 a year into a 401(k)? Hell no (or would have been doing that for the last 25 years instead of designing IC’s). Such activity would be considered “retirement”, not “self-employment”.
 
As long as I don't HAVE to do something for money to support myself, I'm calling it retirement. I enjoy what I do for a living, I really do, I just no longer want to have to do it to support myself.
If I have made the proper plans and they come to fruition, I should be able to do just that!
 
And your boss breathing down your neck asking “are you done yet”

They always seem to think that the necessary stroke of genius or insight can be conjured on a SCHEDULE. Today the topology will be down selected. Tomorrow the EM simulation results from layout will converge to the desired transfer functions. The day after that all the DRC and LVS issues will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. In three days the packages will arrive at the dock. Testing will be completed on…. Never seems to work out that way.
 
The amount of schedule slippage is directly related to the number of managers, experts, and other people not actually working on issues that are on the project.

Try to get 60 "experts" in a room to design a cell phone. It took several weeks of half or whole day sessions 3 to 5 days a week just to agree on the feature set. 60 bickering experts will eventually converge on some minimalist POS that nobody will buy. Then a few of us will gather up all the ideas from the meeting notes, pick out several possible feature sets, propose products from those sets, then submit them to marketing. After marketing craps all over them the process repeats. After two years of this, I left the phone design group.

NEVER let marketing have the upper hand. They will propose something that can't possibly be built. The best example of that was the "put a TV set in the phone" push that occurred from 2005 to 2010. Qualcomm even built out a nationwide broadcasting service called FLO TV and media FLO technology to support mobile TV. Nobody figured out that the battery technology of the time couldn't power a mobile digital TV receiver for more than two hours even without the phone. The current DTV tech does not work well in a mobile situation. It takes several slower bitstreams and some serious DSP to watch TV while in a moving car under less than ideal conditions.

FLO TV went live in 2006 and 2007. It failed in 2010 and was shut down in 2011. AT&T now owns the frequencies for 4G and 5G phone service.
 
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My youngest sister was waiting until 60 to retire, reached that age recently and decided not to retire. It goes without saying that I am older, and I actually have not decided on a specific date - I do know I am in my last role before at least partial retirement, but having received a fairly significant promotion six months ago and the best bonus of my career it doesn't feel very imminent.

There is another problem I have alluded to in past posts, and that is that we live in about the 4th or 5th most expensive urban area in the U.S. and we really like it here, i.e. there is no plan to relocate elsewhere. Somewhere along the way we've both realized we're pretty well wed to this neck of the woods and will be planted here when the end comes.. LOL

So that means money. My wife is a person of modest needs, and a strong saver, I too am a strong saver, but one with an expensive hobby, and I like moderately expensive German cars, and I want to travel in Europe later - the concession I made to my wife was to keep working as long as I could reasonably manage it and in return I get to buy toys now and then. This means a shorter, less boring retirement with more financial resources available. A failed business means I have no retirement savings from before 2002 - I have done well closing the gap, but want a larger buffer..