After browsing for some time, I finally registered with the site today, as I'm less than four weeks from the big day. I still can't really believe it.
The short story is that my wife and I always thought we would retire on the early side. We have always been frugal and fortunate to have well-paying jobs in law. The combination of a covid-induced re-look at our priorities and a leadership succession process at my work that took an unexpected turn led us to decide that now is a good time. I turned 50 last year and my wife is a couple of years younger.
We both gave plenty of notice to our employers (6+ months) and have been working to transition things. That's gone better for me than for her, because she has a role where they need to hire from outside to replace her, and they took advantage of the long notice period to delay starting the search. She has agreed to stay on a bit longer out of loyalty to the company and her colleagues, but at some point there will have to be a drop dead date.
As my username implies, we were based in California, but have recently moved to Washington. We had a second home in Portland, OR for many years and always thought we would retire to the PNW. While we still love Portland, it has had a rough few years and we decided we would prefer to be in the suburbs on the Washington side of the Columbia River rather than the city center.
Things I'm looking forward to in retirement include: more travel (we already have a couple of trips to Europe planned for later this year), exercise (the new house has a fully-equipped gym and I'm moving my rowing shell to a boathouse up here), learning to keep bees (have already started this one, but have a lot to learn), more language learning (I started studying Italian at the beginning of covid), sailing lessons, etc.
Over time we would like to find ways to stay connected to the law. My wife is considering doing mediation work, as it's something she got exposure to at her job and she thinks she would enjoy doing it once in a while to exercise that part of her brain. I've also been involved in non-profit governance and would like to find an organization or two in the PNW to get involved with to try to help.
That's me in a nutshell. Happy to be joining the ranks of the early retirees! I've already gotten some great ideas from threads here like "Blow that dough"
.
The short story is that my wife and I always thought we would retire on the early side. We have always been frugal and fortunate to have well-paying jobs in law. The combination of a covid-induced re-look at our priorities and a leadership succession process at my work that took an unexpected turn led us to decide that now is a good time. I turned 50 last year and my wife is a couple of years younger.
We both gave plenty of notice to our employers (6+ months) and have been working to transition things. That's gone better for me than for her, because she has a role where they need to hire from outside to replace her, and they took advantage of the long notice period to delay starting the search. She has agreed to stay on a bit longer out of loyalty to the company and her colleagues, but at some point there will have to be a drop dead date.
As my username implies, we were based in California, but have recently moved to Washington. We had a second home in Portland, OR for many years and always thought we would retire to the PNW. While we still love Portland, it has had a rough few years and we decided we would prefer to be in the suburbs on the Washington side of the Columbia River rather than the city center.
Things I'm looking forward to in retirement include: more travel (we already have a couple of trips to Europe planned for later this year), exercise (the new house has a fully-equipped gym and I'm moving my rowing shell to a boathouse up here), learning to keep bees (have already started this one, but have a lot to learn), more language learning (I started studying Italian at the beginning of covid), sailing lessons, etc.
Over time we would like to find ways to stay connected to the law. My wife is considering doing mediation work, as it's something she got exposure to at her job and she thinks she would enjoy doing it once in a while to exercise that part of her brain. I've also been involved in non-profit governance and would like to find an organization or two in the PNW to get involved with to try to help.
That's me in a nutshell. Happy to be joining the ranks of the early retirees! I've already gotten some great ideas from threads here like "Blow that dough"
.
