I will turn 66 in August and will be at full retirement age. My company was sold a year ago and I had planned on working for another 2 years, retiring at the end of 2020, when I would be 67 and my wife would be 63. A month ago, my boss, our CEO, came to me and asked if I would be interested in considering a "severance" package. He explained that our new company was willing to pay me for an extra year, with bonuses and equity positions included, as if I was still on the job. I know my heart was racing, but I tried to remain calm, and instead of shouting, "How soon can I sign up for this!", remained calm and asked him what did he want me to do. He started telling me of a new organizational structure that was coming and they needed to eliminate my position to implement it. After more discussion, and getting some reassurances about some of my key employees futures, we agreed that August 2, would be my last day. I will still be getting paid for the same period of time I had planned on working, so it is all working out in my favor.
I am fortunate in that we have enough money to retire and enough to last us until we die. All of my kids are married with good jobs and futures, so we won't be having to support them in the future. We just sold our condo at the beach, replacing it with a house. And will now put our main home on the market and move to the beach permanently.
I'm not sure I am ready to stop working, but I am sure that I am ready to stop working my current job. My son's company has a consulting business, that he has told me would love to talk to me about doing some work for them. I may give that a try, but first, I plan on not even thinking about working for some (limited?) amount of time.
I intend to work on getting our house ready for sale, while at the same time working on getting our new house at the beach renovated. I also plan on getting back on the golf course regularly, which I have not done for 30+ years, fishing, boating, reading, watching TV (Netflix, Prime Video, and YouTube, have a lot of things I would like to see!), spending more time with my grand-kids, taking naps, grilling on my BGE and my new Wilmington grill at the beach, and just generally enjoying life, away from the hectic lifestyle I have been living the past 40 years. I started working at 16, so I will have put in 50 years upon retirement.
I may decide after a while that I want to go back to work, and in fact, if I was 10 years younger, I would really be looking forward to continuing to work for my new company. They are very good to work for and have lived up to every promise they made to us during the sales negotiating period. But now seems like a good time to call it a career. I have yet to run into anyone retired that has told me they hated being retired and wish they hadn't had done it.
The issue I do have is medical/dental coverage for my wife, who is not Medicare eligible yet. We will have the opportunity to continue the current company benefits I have through COBRA, at a much higher cost. So I may do that. I will be looking into other coverage for the next 3 years at the same time. I have appreciated the discussions in this thread regarding Medicare and Social Security benefits.
One last thing. As a retirement present to ourselves, we have scheduled the Viking Ocean World Cruise from Miami to London, starting in Dec 2020 and ending in May 2021. We have done several Viking River Cruises and have enjoyed them immensely, so we are really looking forward to the Ocean cruise.
Really appreciate all of the discussion in this thread and in all of the Cruise Critic boards.
