I have crossed over. I have reached the Promised Land. I am a card carrying member of the FIRE club. It’s taken me more than 50 years to get here. Here’s how I did it.
To be honest, it was something of an accident. I certainly didn’t fall into the “Young Dreamer” category in my 20’s and 30’s. I worked mostly low wage jobs with no benefits. Ever so slowly a combination of fate and environmental factors pushed me in the direction to succeed. You see my first really decent job was working for a Local County Public Agency in the mid 70’s. Fresh out of JC, I applied and was quickly hired in a clerical position. It was doable work, unexciting, safe, and at the time difficult to imagine as a career. After a year I was lured away by a sales job working with a close friend in a small retail shop. It actually paid slightly better (gross salary), the “boss” made sure of that in his initial offer, but the reality was no medical, very little vacation; sick leave didn’t exist, etc. But when you’re young and stupid, a couple more bucks, combined with the extra party opportunities, well, I left the secure government job, and did retail in various forms until I was 28. At that age/time the reality of bringing new life into the world made me rethink the whole “no benefit” thing. Where could I get grand-fathered into a system that would take care of my upcoming new family member? Aha! Epiphany! I needed my old steady public service job back from many years before. Basically I sampled the various Counties in my area of the State, applied at all that were hiring and waited for the call. My original location was in the middle of a hiring freeze, so no go there. I ended up working for the bright enterprise that picked me first for the next 23 straight years. Oh if could tack on the tweener years back to that first job and have 30 straight, but alas, I lived, I learned. I even had some fun in those intervening years.
But again, you see it still wasn’t about ER or even FI for me at age 28, it was about paid Medical plans in an uncertain world. Fast Forward, many years pass, that marriage fell apart, and I eventually found my Lobster at age 38. Talk about waiting for Miss Right. She kissed a few frogs herself, giving us the advantage of both knowing a good thing when we found it. Move on to age 43. That’s when the “plan” came into being. I casually looked up the potential retirement allowance for folks in our positions, she also being a County worker, and found we could count on $15k/year each if we could hang around until we were both 50. We found we shared the ER mindset. Combing our incomes that seemed like an almost doable figure, and definitely so if we could save like the dickens for the next 7 years. Remember this was the late 90’s so my concept of returns was pretty inflated. I was tossing round rates of returns of 10-12 percent and thinking I was conservative, and predicting that we could each realize $100k in our 457 plans (Gov version of a 401k) by the end of the 7 year period what with all the fantastic compounding and appreciation, yada yada. Sorry to say that do to circumstances beyond our control, under the title “Stuff Happens” we didn’t achieve the rate of return, or even the rate of savings we were counting on, half of our nest egg going for survival expenses during a few dark years in the middle of the sequence. In the end though, the Retirement System in my little County went through a revision in the early 2000’s that enhanced the benefit significantly. It seems that fund had been so well managed (go figure) they actually were able to bump up the tables a bit with no risk to existing or future retirees. Hallelujah!
So as our plan neared completion we benefited from last but far from least, being good at what we did, garnering several merited promotions, and achieving higher than predicted salaries near the ends of our respective careers. DW’s career was cut a couple years short by medical problems, but she was close enough that we have bridged that gap, she is retired now and having a concrete medical plan that can’t be terminated is a very good thing. I stepped aside in March 2006 at age 50 ¾, and yes the three quarters counts in the calc. We end up with about $50k combined income with a modest COLA each year. It was 2% last 2 years. We also have a modest amount in a 457 plan. We recently decided to let this bit of pretax savings simmer a while until we need it for something especially fun. We are able to dip into at will, but see no need to tap it right away. We’re comfortable we can live pretty nicely on our newly determined “fixed income” (LOL), even save a bit for future major expenses, like those occasional 2 month trips to Europe we’ve often talked about. In a decade at 62 we can look forward to a small raise when we sign up for SS. Won’t be much, maybe 10-12k/yr each, but it’ll be a nice nudge to help us along, yet something we won’t need to survive.
That’s our story and we’re sticking around.
8) : 
![:-\](https://www.early-retirement.org/sk/forums/images/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
To be honest, it was something of an accident. I certainly didn’t fall into the “Young Dreamer” category in my 20’s and 30’s. I worked mostly low wage jobs with no benefits. Ever so slowly a combination of fate and environmental factors pushed me in the direction to succeed. You see my first really decent job was working for a Local County Public Agency in the mid 70’s. Fresh out of JC, I applied and was quickly hired in a clerical position. It was doable work, unexciting, safe, and at the time difficult to imagine as a career. After a year I was lured away by a sales job working with a close friend in a small retail shop. It actually paid slightly better (gross salary), the “boss” made sure of that in his initial offer, but the reality was no medical, very little vacation; sick leave didn’t exist, etc. But when you’re young and stupid, a couple more bucks, combined with the extra party opportunities, well, I left the secure government job, and did retail in various forms until I was 28. At that age/time the reality of bringing new life into the world made me rethink the whole “no benefit” thing. Where could I get grand-fathered into a system that would take care of my upcoming new family member? Aha! Epiphany! I needed my old steady public service job back from many years before. Basically I sampled the various Counties in my area of the State, applied at all that were hiring and waited for the call. My original location was in the middle of a hiring freeze, so no go there. I ended up working for the bright enterprise that picked me first for the next 23 straight years. Oh if could tack on the tweener years back to that first job and have 30 straight, but alas, I lived, I learned. I even had some fun in those intervening years.
But again, you see it still wasn’t about ER or even FI for me at age 28, it was about paid Medical plans in an uncertain world. Fast Forward, many years pass, that marriage fell apart, and I eventually found my Lobster at age 38. Talk about waiting for Miss Right. She kissed a few frogs herself, giving us the advantage of both knowing a good thing when we found it. Move on to age 43. That’s when the “plan” came into being. I casually looked up the potential retirement allowance for folks in our positions, she also being a County worker, and found we could count on $15k/year each if we could hang around until we were both 50. We found we shared the ER mindset. Combing our incomes that seemed like an almost doable figure, and definitely so if we could save like the dickens for the next 7 years. Remember this was the late 90’s so my concept of returns was pretty inflated. I was tossing round rates of returns of 10-12 percent and thinking I was conservative, and predicting that we could each realize $100k in our 457 plans (Gov version of a 401k) by the end of the 7 year period what with all the fantastic compounding and appreciation, yada yada. Sorry to say that do to circumstances beyond our control, under the title “Stuff Happens” we didn’t achieve the rate of return, or even the rate of savings we were counting on, half of our nest egg going for survival expenses during a few dark years in the middle of the sequence. In the end though, the Retirement System in my little County went through a revision in the early 2000’s that enhanced the benefit significantly. It seems that fund had been so well managed (go figure) they actually were able to bump up the tables a bit with no risk to existing or future retirees. Hallelujah!
So as our plan neared completion we benefited from last but far from least, being good at what we did, garnering several merited promotions, and achieving higher than predicted salaries near the ends of our respective careers. DW’s career was cut a couple years short by medical problems, but she was close enough that we have bridged that gap, she is retired now and having a concrete medical plan that can’t be terminated is a very good thing. I stepped aside in March 2006 at age 50 ¾, and yes the three quarters counts in the calc. We end up with about $50k combined income with a modest COLA each year. It was 2% last 2 years. We also have a modest amount in a 457 plan. We recently decided to let this bit of pretax savings simmer a while until we need it for something especially fun. We are able to dip into at will, but see no need to tap it right away. We’re comfortable we can live pretty nicely on our newly determined “fixed income” (LOL), even save a bit for future major expenses, like those occasional 2 month trips to Europe we’ve often talked about. In a decade at 62 we can look forward to a small raise when we sign up for SS. Won’t be much, maybe 10-12k/yr each, but it’ll be a nice nudge to help us along, yet something we won’t need to survive.
That’s our story and we’re sticking around.
8) : 
