How long did your parents work?

[Koolau]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelB When we lived in Caracas water shortages were common, leading to extended periods of unflushed toilets. I agree, flushed toilets are great!

We keep a 32 gallon plastic storage box of water plus a 2 qt. dipper in each bathroom. Handy for our not-infrequent power fails. Gravity feed is good for a few hours, but after that, there's no water. It's worse for the sewers, but I think they all have at least some back up power for the pumps. It had occurred to me that they don't supply back up power to the fresh water so that the sewers won't back up when their supply of diesel is exhausted. That sounded pretty smart, but I have not confirmed this as an actual strategy. Truth is we're not too big on strategy here in the Islands. We go with the flow - oops! Sorry about that. YMMV

[jollystomper]

My Dad grew up in a foster home outside of the USA and started working from the age of 8, as all of the kids in the home had to help out financially. He got enough education to get a job working in a business as a clerk when he was 20. When he emigrated to the US at age 33 he worked various clerical positions while we studied to get first his HS equivalency and associates degree and to improve his English which was not his native language (fortunately he had a knack for languages and was fluent in about half a dozen) He got a job as a lab technician at age 40 and worked in that field for 30 years until age 70. He probably could have retired at 66 once the last of his kids (7) graduated from college, but kept working until 70 to maximize SS survivor benefits for my mother.

My mother was primarily a SAHM. Although she only had formal education up to age of 14 in her native country, she was smart and self taught herself a lot. She worked periodically when her and my Dad felt extra income was needed. She had a gift for math; she applied for a job doing check processing at a major bank and apparently aced the exam they gave. She would do that periodically, back when check processing was done at night by people. She also had great cooking and seamstress skills and would earn money using those skills. She waited until all of her kids graduated from high school before getting her HS equivalency diploma.

My Dad sadly only enjoyed retirement for about 2.5 years until he died at 72. My mom outlived him by 20 years. She never worked for money after his death, but did a ton of volunteer work.

I worked summers from age 14 and my full time job out of college with Megacorp lasted 39 years. It was a piece of cake compared to what my parents went through . They both died before I retired, but they would have been very happy that I was able to.

[Bamaman]

MegaCorp overreacted to the 2008 market crash and retired all employees 55 and older. Best thing to happen to me at age 58 1/2 after working 36 1/2 years. And they paid out the nose to get rid of us.

My father worked 39 years at our power company in personnel, and he retired at age 59. He jokingly said ER came because the largest coal fired steam plant in the world kept having boiler failures. He would have to come up with 450 union workers (steamfitters and boilermakers) in 3 days to start 6 month repairs. He lived 28 great years after retirement but diabetes put him into renal failure and 4 years on hemodialysis.

[brett]

My father retired at 58/59. He was in poor health. He had been off work for five months. On his first or second day back his VP asked him how he was. My dad said he was ready to go.

His boss said go home, six leave for six months. Then co e back and we will give you a medical pension. 35 plus years.

He moved to the west coast. 18 holes of golf three times a week. His health improved overnight. Lived to 87...never spent one day in a care home.

Oddly enough, I retired at the same age.

[Venturer]

My Dad retired at 62 as supervisor of maintence then would be called often to "help diagnose" problems at said plant for a "hefty" fee. He also had a portable welder on his truck and expanded his shop after that and would do contract welding as his hobby. When he died at 74 at his visitation most of the great comments revolved around his skills that way,and it seemed like the whole town came by. The minister said that he was of the opinion that Jr. could have "welded anything but a broken heart". My mother retired at 57 after her 1st bout with cancer,which she went on to beat it 3 times until it finally beat her at age 68. I am now the same age as my mother was and 6 years younger than my father was. Both sets of grandparents passed away in their mid to late 70's so I may have a few years left. When it does come my time their isn't much I can do about it so I'm just living my life as well as possible for the time I have left.

[Venturer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Venturer My Dad retired at 62 as supervisor of maintence then would be called often to "help diagnose" problems at said plant for a "hefty" fee. He also had a portable welder on his truck and expanded his shop after that and would do contract welding as his hobby. When he died at 74 at his visitation most of the great comments revolved around his skills that way,and it seemed like the whole town came by. The minister said that he was of the opinion that Jr. could have "welded anything but a broken heart". My mother retired at 57 after her 1st bout with cancer,which she went on to beat it 3 times until it finally beat her at age 68. I am now the same age as my mother was and 6 years younger than my father was. Both sets of grandparents passed away in their mid to late 70's so I may have a few years left. When it does come my time their isn't much I can do about it so I'm just living my life as well as possible for the time I have left.

I hope I didn't sound to morbid but reading all these replies just got me to thinking about my life in general. Thanks to all for so many differant subjects in this forum.

[scrabbler1]

My dad worked from the early 1950s until he retired in 1994 at age 63. He was on the verge of being sent to Korea in the early 1950s but his boss was able to convince the Navy folks his work was vital to the war effort (his employer produced goods for the Defense Department), so he was discharged and sent back home to continue his work as a tool and die designer. He just turned 90 last month.

My mom was in and out of the workforce over my lifetime, working off and on in the textile industry as a clothing designer through the early 1980s, sometimes working at the plant, sometimes freelance, working from home in her own design studio. But the textile industry was moving overseas to Hong Kong where the labor was cheaper, and her design work dried up. She smartly retooled, taking a 9-month course at a local trade school to design electronic circuit boards . She re-entered the workforce in 1984 and kept working until 1991, when she was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. She went out on disability and fought her illness valiantly before passing away in 1995 at age 59.

[pacergal]

Dad was a farm boy, so he worked in some capacity from about the time he could walk! After his time in the Army, he and Mom married and moved.
Mom was SAHM until I was about 4th grade, then she went back to school, got her degree and worked until age 58. Dad retired several years later at age 65.
Mom died age 79, Dad 86.

[skyking1]

Mom was 59, Dad retired at 60. She lived many years after but dad was gone in 3 due to a bad heart. He died in my arms when we were out shopping, and that as much as any other thing has driven me to retire sooner than later.

[NateW]

My dad was a college professor and geneticist. He unwillingly retired at age 51 (this put his working career at about 24 years) following admission to the hospital for a biopsy of a suspected brain tumor.

I was in my mid 20s and visiting my mother Christmas week in Tucson, AZ (my parents just separated) when he got the bad news from his neurologist. The previous week my dad saw the neurologist who sent him for brain imaging. The week before that he complained of headaches and had a metallic taste in his mouth and was just not himself.

Mother and I flew back home to the east coast on Christmas Day. The next day Dad had the biopsy performed. After reviewing the biopsy and additional imaging reports, the hospital neurosurgeon took my mother and me into one of the little family meeting rooms at the end of the hallway in the surgical ward and said my dad had an inoperable geoblastoma multiform about the size of a large lemon and added my dad had 6 months to a year to live. That was the shock of my life. With radiation therapy, rudimentary chemotherapy and palliative care he lived 5 years with mother and I caring for him. He was kind of ok at first but things gradually got worse and the last two month of his life were pure hell that I would not wish on my worst enemy. Unfortunately, almost no progress has been made over the last 40 years towards a cure of this type of cancer.

What my dad went through made me realize how fragile and uncertain life is and I believe unconsciously, my motivator to ER.

My mother worked on and off as a research assistant for my father and after his illness got her teaching masters and became a highschool teacher to support herself. She retired at 62, having had enough of wo*k. Although she made some wise investments with Dad's $50,000 life insurance proceeds, she subsisted on SS, my dad's small pension, and a small teacher's pension.

[finnski1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by brett My father retired at 58/59. He was in poor health. He had been off work for five months. On his first or second day back his VP asked him how he was. My dad said he was ready to go. His boss said go home, six leave for six months. Then co e back and we will give you a medical pension. 35 plus years. He moved to the west coast. 18 holes of golf three times a week. His health improved overnight. Lived to 87...never spent one day in a care home. Oddly enough, I retired at the same age.

It's nice to hear stories of benevolent bosses. Many would have possibly denied him his pension without batting an eye.

[Born2BRetd]

My father had a goal of retiring at 50 which he accomplished. He became a Master Gardener and had many interests which kept him busy.

My mother was a Stay at Home Mom to six kids and after we all left the next she helped take care of her mother and then her MIL. She now lives in a Senior Living apartment and is finally enjoying her retirement.

[GalaxyBoy]

DF retired at age 59. He went to work for the N&W railroad at age 16 after high school (not as many grades then) and worked there his entire career except for breaks for WWII and Korea. He started as a messenger and became a computer programmer in 1964. He told me of using the mainframe that had all of 4 kB of RAM. When N&W merged with the Southern in the 1980s he couldn’t RE fast enough! Of course, back then, there were traditional pensions with health insurance, even a separate pension for Mom who was a housewife her whole married life.

So he was behind me 100% for FIRE.

[H2ODude]

DM worked outside of home after kids left. DF was chem engineer and was laid off in mid fifties (age, not decade), moved from midwest to NJ so could job shop with refineries and such. I think he was about 64 when hung that up. Had a comfortable but somewhat strange retirement, first living by DW and me and our children, then DM insisted they move to very rural OK because she was a "country girl" at heart and they had visited my brother there and she really took to it. DF was not happy about that but off they went. I knew my brother would be no help to them and in no time there was, let's just say a major falling out. After two or three years there, DM came down with cancer and I moved them back by us, actually into our house where hospice took over. She passed at 70 and he held out until 77. In his last year we moved again and moved him in with us, hospice once again.

Comparatively ours is a much better retirement both financially and just in general enjoyment. As years tick off I often find myself thinking, hmm, what were my parents doing at this age? The fact that they were smokers puts me way ahead on the physical side of things, she had lung cancer and he lost out to emphysema. My brother had both.

While rambling about parents, one regret I have about my father. Born in 1920, he was prime age for WW2. However, he spent those years in grad school at Princeton and all I know is he worked on Manhattan project, something to do with boron. I regret never having delved into exactly what it was he did research on. All I recall is that he didn't know exactly what the end purpose was of what he was doing. I believe he also did some prospecting in Idaho or thereabouts during that time. So there are some mysteries of those years of his I wish I had asked more about.

[Gumby]

The control rods in a nuclear reactor are made of boron carbide. Sometimes the spent fuel pools are filled with a borate solution and sometimes the core itself is filled with a borate solution to ensure safe shutdown.

[Andre1969]

My Mom retired at 62. She had something like 41 years with the federal government, or whatever it is that you need, to max out your retirement under the old CSRS plan. I always thought it was 40 years, where you got 80%, but she said that it was actually slightly more. My stepdad was a plumbing inspector for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. He took an early retirement, something like 59.5, around the same time my Mom did.

In retrospect, both of them said they regretted retiring when they did, but they're both looking through their former careers with rose tinted glasses. Mom was getting fed up with the way the Federal government was starting to turn, and her catchphrase was starting to become "Piss me off enough, and I'll retire!" As for my stepdad, he has his faults, and I can't stand him sometimes, but one thing I'll say for him...he actually is honest as the day is long. And, in his career that would prove to bite him on the butt. His superiors were taking bribes to pass shoddy plumbing on big projects, especially those megachurches and such that seem to proliferate around here. They tried to get my stepdad to pass them, but he would refuse. As a result, they piled work on him, made his life miserable, etc, so he decided to go out around the same time as my Mom.

Of course, to ask either of them about that now, they'll both say "Oh, our jobs weren't that bad". But, it's also been around 10 years. Mom went out in January of 2011, and my stepdad soon after. So, at this point they've both come to accept retirement and be happy with it, and any aspirations about going back to work are probably gone for good.

My Dad was a dental technician for the Veteran's hospital in DC, or something like that. I know he was federal government, but he was on some kind of system, other than the GS-XX that I'm more familiar with. He retired at 62, as soon as he was eligible for SS, but he did it to take care of Granddad, his father, who at that point was 94, and while healthy for his age, was starting to slip.

[aja8888]

My Dad started working in the coal mines in Pennsylvania at age 14 or so since his parents (my grandparents died early). When WWII broke out, Dad joined the Navy to get out of the coal mines. I figure he was a functional alcoholic by then from the stories he told me when I was a kid.

After the war, he and Mom relocated to Connecticut so he could find work in Bridgeport in a record cutting factory. Dad never finished high school. Mom did not either from what I know. I was about 3 years old after the war.

My parents had two more children (my sisters) in the next few years and that qualified our family to move into a housing project (not a great place). Dad worked factory jobs and finally got a job in the Post Office unloading trucks, until he was 62.

I left home at 17 after high school, worked for a while, and when I got my draft notice, went into the military.

Dad died at 62 (just retired) and it was not pretty when you die of too much Vodka. Mom only worked in her later years and that was part time until she was 70 as she was living with one of my sisters. She passed at 82 and had pretty bad dementia.

My parents never had much of a life, let alone a comfy retirement. I guess a lot of how you end up is a function of where you start.

Somehow, the alcoholic gene only touched two out of three of us siblings. However, it passed to some of our children as we have had some long term issues in that area. All is good now. Off topic a bit, sorry.

[FI_RElater]

"old man" was a "lifer"; military life didn't really allow for spouse to work... (from third to seventh grade, I was in eight different schools!) As you can imagine, employers wanted a more permanent worker

as for him, like many he went in early and stayed in but not the full thirty year (his was from late WW2 and into Vietnam...) and did some work after (total was probably 40+ years)
{passing before eligible for SS; she preceased him}

[dixonge]

My Dad was a pastor for 50 years. He got into debt early on and struggled to get out the rest of his life. He had to keep working to make payments. He finally had a church large enough to cancel his debt so he could actually retire at 80, nine years ago.



This was a big factor in our E-R inspiration - I did *not* want to work until I was too old to enjoy it!

[Dash man]

My father worked as an engineer until he had a series of strokes at 55. He died at 72. My mom got cancer at 55 and died at 61. My aunts and uncles lived into their 80s and 90s, so there’s hope. I’ve already surpassed my mom’s age. My biggest advantage is I’ve never smoked as they did.