Retirement Planning vs. Planning to Retire

Today I turned 59¾. Practically 60. Three months ago I was 59½, which means nothing to most of you but some will recognize as the age when I can start taking money out of my dedicated retirement accounts without paying IRS penalties. This is the second big Getting Old milestone, IMHO (#1 being that envelope in the mail from AARP, just letting you know that age 50 means you’re eligible to join now*).

I’ve been doing retirement planning since the 1980s, when I was still in the Navy. My best friend at the time persuaded me** to start setting aside money for retirement in case I didn’t end up with 20 years service (I didn’t) and an emergency fund because Shit Happens (got that right!). Lately, though, I have come to recognize the difference between Retirement Planning vs. Planning to Retire: one involves accumulating more money than you ever imagined having in your life, while the other involves realizing that you are actually, truly, really not going to be working anymore, and maybe it might be a good idea to figure out what that actually means.

On the one hand, I’m reading articles with stats that show that the average person my age has saved as much as one would get by putting all their spare change into a mason jar every night, and then periodically losing the mason jar, so we are totally freaking rich when graded on a curve.

On the other hand, there are these online retirement quizzes that act dumbfounded that anyone could have socked away as little as we have and still been allowed to vote and buy alcohol. “With your savings level, you can retire at age 65 with your current lifestyle, and maintain it in comfort until… Thursday. Possibly late Thursday. Bright and early Friday, though, you’re definitely screwed.”***

But while having money to retire is nice, there’s the question, What Does That Mean Exactly? I’ve decided that the real question is, What Do I Want To Be After I Grow up?

I’ve had goals all my adult(ish) life, some long-term, some short-term:

• Get into the Naval Academy. (Done.)
• Graduate and go into nuclear subs. (Done.)
• Become a qualified sub driver. (Missed.)
• Use my computer knowledge to be useful as a shore-based Naval officer if I can’t drive boats. (Done.)
• Get promoted to lieutenant commander so I can stay in the Navy. (Missed.)
• Get married to Linda. (Done.****)
• Stay married to Linda. (Missed.)
• Find a computer job in California. (Done… eventually. But it was in Silicon Valley, so extra points.)
• Get the frak out of frakin’ California. (Done.)
• Move back to New England. (Ummmm…*****)
• Work at tech or semi-tech jobs that don’t drive me nuts… until they drive me nuts, than go on to the next one. (So far, so good.)
• Get married to Deb. (DONE!!)
• Make Deb happy. (So far, so good.)
• And then…

And then Deb (who is 3½ years older than I) is looking to retire a couple years from now, and then what? I keep working while she kicks around, making plans that depend on my vacation schedule?

And, I find more and more, I’m having Bad Days. They scare me. Days when my mind isn’t sharp. Days when my eyes aren’t sharp (not fun when the work day consists of staring at a screen). Days when I spend most of the day anxious about {almost doesn’t matter, really}. Days when my chest hurts like someone is pushing on it (but it’s not angina, my doctors tell me, by which they mean not unstable angina). I know the drill. Bad Days build up until they just become days, and then I start having Good Days. And then those get fewer and fewer. So there’s that. Tick tock.

What do I want to be after I grow up? I want to be Deb’s husband, boyfriend, partner, companion, and friend.

So I’m going to retire in a couple years, when my wife does. (Although for both of us, “retire” means “switch to part time at our current companies if they’re agreeable, and if not, shtup ’em, we’ll freelance or temp.”) We are building toward that now, with money from our emergency fund going into our four-season porch and rebuilding our back yard so that we have a home where we’ll love spending more time. I’ve mapped out the funding, and it works, even with delaying Social Security until we’re fully eligible. And we are starting to check out local retirement villages, so that in the next year or so we’ll put down a deposit and set a move-in timeframe (probably around 2030). We’re going to cruise to Alaska for our 20th Anniversary in 2020, and travel to other places we might like in other years (we really like traveling together).

There are assumptions in this, of course. That the country won’t enter another civil war, or if it does, it won’t upend us. That our investments won’t totally tank in the next recession. That something horribly bad like cancer (Deb’s side of the family) or heart disease (my side) or dementia (me again)****** won’t happen in the next ten years. That technology will continue to be our friend.

And then we’ll see how we do after we’ve grown up.

*We did sign up for AARP, but later regretted it. It was when we got an over-the-top mailing from them reminding me that AARP is, when all is said and done, a highly one-sided lobbying organization with some odd side benefits to members, and if you don’t like their my-way-or-the-highway slant on things you can quit. So we did. Never regretted it (our AAA discounts work as well or better than our AARP discounts).

**Very sharp, persuasive woman, which is how she talked me into marrying her with very little effort. The marriage didn’t work, but monetarily I was in great shape, which not everyone can say after a divorce.

***Followed by a pitch for taking on a retirement advisor, who will guarantee a comfortable retirement (theirs, definitely; yours, ehhh).

****Yes, she asked me first. Still counts.

*****Gonna call that a Miss, although PA is on the way to New England from California, so it’s not final. OTOH, it’s been 24 years since I arrived in PA, and I’ve lived here longer than any other state or country, so, okay, call me a Pennsylvanian.

******Also, I’m brain damaged. What’s called a traumatic brain injury, these days. Airplane crash back in 1982. I’m pretty functional, pretty much, and what were once compensation mechanisms are now habits, but I remember when I used to be smarter. So I’m thinking I should probably plan for when not if regarding dementia.