Katsmeow
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2009
- Messages
- 5,308
I ESR'ed 6 months ago, DH retired completely at the end of June.
Keep meaning to report and never get around to it.
It has mostly been going well.
I am working part time about 1 day a week. That is, I go into the office one day and usually do some more work at home. This has been surprising pleasant. I am paid well to basically do the fun things about my job (still working for my former employer). When I started on the part time work I wasn't sure how long I would do it and whether I would enjoy it. What I have learned is that doing my actual work is fine. Much of what I found stressful in the past were the things surrounding the actual work and trying to juggle all the scheduling. None of that is an issue now and the work itself is fine.
DH managed to retire at the best possible moment. A month earlier and he would have had a year less service, significantly lessening his pension lump sum. A month later and for some strange reason it would have been several thousand less.
We have been very busy and I find that I still have more that I want to do than time to do it. I am finally regularly going to the gym now that I have time to prioritize those kinds of things.
We still have kids at home so that keeps us busy also.
The only negative is that we planned to downsize. We paid cash to buy our smaller retirement home which we planned to remodel extensively (had a great location). We needed to sell our current house.
Well, six months later, current house is still not sold. Worse, we found out that remodeling the other house is not feasible so we'll be tearing it down to build a new house. To do that now, we would have to take out retirement money paying a huge amount in taxes. We could do it but don't want to. So we want to take a loan out to build the new house but can't do that until we sell the existing house.
We're OK financially now. My income from the part time work covers the extra cost of living in our current home. We knew it might take awhile to sell -- even in good times houses in our area which are on acreage often take a year or more to sell. Still, we want to move on and get rid of this one particularly since it is expensive to maintain and we want to get on with building the other house.
Keep meaning to report and never get around to it.
It has mostly been going well.
I am working part time about 1 day a week. That is, I go into the office one day and usually do some more work at home. This has been surprising pleasant. I am paid well to basically do the fun things about my job (still working for my former employer). When I started on the part time work I wasn't sure how long I would do it and whether I would enjoy it. What I have learned is that doing my actual work is fine. Much of what I found stressful in the past were the things surrounding the actual work and trying to juggle all the scheduling. None of that is an issue now and the work itself is fine.
DH managed to retire at the best possible moment. A month earlier and he would have had a year less service, significantly lessening his pension lump sum. A month later and for some strange reason it would have been several thousand less.
We have been very busy and I find that I still have more that I want to do than time to do it. I am finally regularly going to the gym now that I have time to prioritize those kinds of things.
We still have kids at home so that keeps us busy also.
The only negative is that we planned to downsize. We paid cash to buy our smaller retirement home which we planned to remodel extensively (had a great location). We needed to sell our current house.
Well, six months later, current house is still not sold. Worse, we found out that remodeling the other house is not feasible so we'll be tearing it down to build a new house. To do that now, we would have to take out retirement money paying a huge amount in taxes. We could do it but don't want to. So we want to take a loan out to build the new house but can't do that until we sell the existing house.
We're OK financially now. My income from the part time work covers the extra cost of living in our current home. We knew it might take awhile to sell -- even in good times houses in our area which are on acreage often take a year or more to sell. Still, we want to move on and get rid of this one particularly since it is expensive to maintain and we want to get on with building the other house.