How I ended up retired

How my thinking changed

Retirement was never a holy grail for me.  I didn't dream of retirement or complain about needing to work and I loved my job.  I didn't yearn for retirement and when others were counting down the days or years until they retired, I would shudder. Work gave me meaning, identity and personal accomplishment.  I had always wanted to be a teacher and enjoyed moving into administration to end my career.  My original plan was to work until my husband retired in June 2017 or to even continue longer.

Don't get me wrong I was a teacher, so I was always home when my children were home for holidays.  And I loved my summers.  But I was busy during those times.  During the summer, I was a stay-at-home mom and spent lots of my time catching up and getting ahead of mountains of housework so that the school year would be less hectic.

The date I was eligible to retire was November 30th 2013. It passed with a twinge of awareness that quickly went away.  I still had things to do in my career and with a child in university there was tuition to pay.  Plus I couldn't imagine being at home for four years waiting for my husband to join me.


But somewhere in the last year those feeling and that plan changed rather dramatically.  These are some of the things that brought that about.

The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan has a website with a retirement calculator.  My husband introduced it to me.  It allows you to play around with different dates, and various options to obtain an estimate of your pension payment each month.  By working for two years after my retirement date, the gap between my pension and my pay was shrinking.  Was it really worth it to get up in the morning, drive for almost an hour during unpredictable winter weather to work in a stressful environment? As a school administrator, your responsibilities are enormous, the workload is heavy and the liabilities are scary.   After taking into account the cost of gas and car upkeep, the cost of clothing, the savings from being organized and on top of things at home and the gap was even smaller.  The logical part of being able to afford to live without working was making retirement enticing.

I spent January 2015 trying to get my asthma under control.  It was a miserable winter and the cold, dry air took a toll on my lungs. Cold is the major trigger.  The thought of spending the cold winter months in doors catching up on all the things I want to do in the house became rather appealing.  No winter driving on dark cold mornings and the chance to have adequate sleep were equally enticing.

My last child graduated from university, so no more tuition.  My daughter got married and lives across the country from us in B.C. The freedom to visit her and the ability to stay awake long enough to talk to her despite the time difference--very enticing.

I have a great desire to travel, almost every where in the world is on my bucket list.  Yet, despite working my entire adult life I have not travelled as much as I would like. The only time we can travel is the busiest and most costly time.  What's the point of working if I am never going anywhere?  Retirement would mean that we could take advantage of off times and offers; a great enticement.

Somewhere during that time my feelings towards my job also changed.  I had always said that when I retired I wanted to be able to say I still loved what I did.  I was beginning to feel the enjoyment, the pride and excitement of solving problems and conquering challenges slipping away.  I began to feel less autonomous, less self directed and less interested in the much of the work that didn't involve dealing with people.   A life with less rushing, less stress and freedom to set my own pace was becoming the greatest enticement of all.

The life that I wanted to live began to call to me too.  I was coming home from work, eating, cleaning up and then falling asleep.  I was too tired after work or on weekends to be able to find the time to do all the things I wanted to do.  Here we were, empty nesters with no real calls on our time but not the energy to do anything with that time.  I had already worked two years longer than I needed to, did I really want to do three, let alone four?

Then I read the book, How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free  and started to think about what retiring could mean for me. I had stopped thinking of retirement as the end but instead started thinking of it as the beginning.