As we approach the end of 2022, it is fair to say that we have experienced a huge amount of change this year. After a horrific 2021 of personal losses, we made the decision to early retired at the age of 51 in the summer after 30 years of teaching. We sold our family home of 20+ years, relocated to the Yorkshire Dales and purchased our forever dream cottage that requires a significant renovation.
So what have we learned so far from our first few months of early retirement? We have tried to distill some of our thoughts and experiences down to the following key areas.
There is never an ideal time to early retire.
Like most things in life, if you wait for perfect…you will be waiting a long time. We deliberated long and hard about our decision to retire early, and on many occasions questioned wether it actually was the right time.
In reality- it has all worked out ok so far. Everyones journey into early retirement will be different, but waiting for a time when it will all be unicorns and rainbows is foolhardy. To quote the wise Chinese proverb- a journey of a 1000 miles begins with a first step. We decided to make that first step in the summer and have never regretted our decision.
It's not as difficult as you might think.
Life is difficult and at times can be hell (Jordan Peterson), but taking the step to early retirement is no more or less difficult than any other decision in life that needs to be made.
We made our decision based on the question: what is the worst that could possibly happen? For us, if it all turned pear shaped, we would have to look for employment for a few more years. We would still have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies- after those things everything else is a bonus in our eyes.
We have been genuinely surprised at how easy the whole process turned out to be. The world didn’t end, our lives didn’t suddenly lack meaning and our relationship didn’t crumble. In reality, it was just another big decision very similar to lots of other big decisions we have made many times before.
You need to work really hard to maintain relationships.
When you retire, the working world continues to spin without you. Relationships are a two way thing. Don’t think that friends have a responsibility to keep in contact with you if you are not willing to put the effort to keep in contact with them too.
Your friends that you have left behind in the working world are far too busy dealing with all the work related s**t that you no longer have to deal with. Do you remember what it was like at the coal face and how all consuming working life actually was? In retirement you now have the time to invest in maintaining those valuable relationships- don’t expect them to be handed to you on a plate.
We take time each week to keep in touch with our friends and family. We make it a routine to reach out to old friends and to be a really good friend to the people that we love. If they choose not to reciprocate- that is fine, as we understand that they are really busy. We have quickly learned that the joy of friendships and relationships is in the giving not the receiving.
The hidden benefits that we never even considered.
We have more time to really invest in the important things in life.
We have found that our general health has improved.
We are sleeping better and for longer.
We are generally less stressed... but see below for our caveat on this.
We are increasingly content with the things that we have in our lives.
We are more grateful for the simple things that everyday life brings us.
Stress doesn’t disappear…but it does change.
Thinking that early retirement suddenly removes all of life’s stressors was a naive pipe-dream for us.
What we have quickly come to realise is that although early retirement does remove the significant work related stress that everyone faces- but that stress is simply replaced by other stressors in life. For us, we had worries related to our house move and renovations, we worry about money and how our financial plans are progressing. In addition life continues to bring a whole boat load of stress that we can never fully prepare for.
We have quickly come to the conclusion that stress in live is inevitable, but early retirement for us has changed the focus of that stress and made it much more manageable.
Time is still limited.
When we both were teaching, our free time was very limited. During term time we worked late into the nights and also did a lot of planning over the weekends to get ready for the following week. As such, we organised with military precision our free time away from the job. With no apologies, we holidayed well and took every available opportunity to get away in our VW campervan to unwind and switch off from the pressures of work.
Since early retirement, we no longer have these work related time constraints, but we have noticed an interesting phenomenon. The more free time we seem to have, the more we want to squeeze into it. In productivity circles, this is known as Parkinson’s Law- any task expands to fit the time allocated to it. In our little retirement world, as our free time has increased, our bucket list has expanded to fill that time and we still don’t know how we are going to fit everything in that we want to do. It is fair to say that all the skills we learned when managing our time when at work are equally applicable in retirement.
It can be cheaper than you think.
We were really worried about covering the costs of living when we retired. It is still something that we worry about on a daily basis, as ultimately if we get it wrong we will have to go back to work which we really don’t want to have to do! We know that if we can make a few compromises with our spending, it will enable us to have more experiences during our early retirement years.
Sticking to a tight budget has not been as bad as we first feared. We cannot believe how much we actually spent when working- working for a living is really expensive! The weekly travel costs, the work clothes, the gym membership to keep us sane, the little expenses around the edges that mount up- all of those costs have now disappeared.
Living a simple life is not only really refreshing, but is ultimately very economical.
We have become really adept at recognising a want instead of a genuine need. We know we don’t want for much, because we have pretty much everything we need to lead the simple life that we aspire to. For example, we have all the clothes that we need, anything else would be surplus to our requirements. Whenever we buy something new, we try to operate a one in, one out system. We absolutely don’t want to just end up with more stuff after working so hard to simplify our lives. Purchasing something new must be able to enhance our lives significantly for us to be happy with the purchase.
For us, less really is more.
Loosen your grip on life and schedules.
In my working life I loved a good schedule! For years I wrote the whole school timetable for goodness sake- there was no one happier to follow a good schedule than me. In retirement, not only does life not happen this way, this rigid reliance on the timelines of life is just not needed. At first I found this concept really difficult- I still find it really difficult, but with practise I am getting better at loosening my grip on life.
Earlier this week, I slept in for the first time in months. I am normally an early riser and I have a very set morning routine that can start anywhere between 5 and 6am. This particular morning I woke up at 9.30am and was completely rocked by this impromptu sleep in. I found it really hard to resist the urge to fly out of bed and start the day (BTW I didn’t resist…I was up and in the shower within 30 seconds- much to Jackie’s amusement!).
This is something that I definitely need to get better at, but a 30 year habit is hard to break. It is fair to say that Jackie has had no such troubles with adjusting to this particular challenge!
Currently, when the weather is good, we try to get out and do the things that we love (that are also free), such as climbing a mountain. Why would we choose to stay inside stripping wallpaper when it is a bluebird winters day and the mountains are calling?
You only realise the negative effect work related stress has on your life when you are out of that situation.
I never really thought that work affected me that much in terms of stress. Obviously I knew like most people, I didn’t like to return to work after a good holiday, and I regularly suffered from that Sunday night feeling, but on the whole, I thought that I was doing ok. How wrong could I have been?
It was only when we had finally retired did we truly realise the negative effect that work had on us both. Sundays evenings now became an absolute joy, illustrating what life should have really been like during our working lives.
The freeing up of the constant brain fog and clutter that work caused was tangible. Durning our working lives, we both suffered from the constant underlying feeling of unease about work related tasks. We struggled to be truly present in the moment, suffering from a feeling of distraction when we really shouldn’t have been thinking about work. In a matter of months, that anxiety has all gone.
We really hope that our little musings have been of some use to you if you are finding yourself in a similar situation to us. We are by no means experts on this and are just bumbling through day by day this whole new world of early retirement. What we can confidently reassure you of is that we are absolutely loving our new life and all the challenges it provides.
Richard & Jackie
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