Content in Retirement

The Fall of 2011 brought to our family a dilemma that we turned into an opportunity. I was at the age where we were starting to prepare for an early retirement, working in an industry that was in a severe decline. As with most waning industries, there were periods of intense upheaval, the dying gasps and the fight to survive a few more years. The Fall of 2011 was just one such period in the newsprint industry. Our industry was dying and in an effort to prolong it's survival, major changes were needed and a large downsizing of the workforce was one of the first steps. Not much time was given to make a decision of this magnitude, less than 72 hours. 

My wife and I sat down and crunched the numbers, we weighed the pros and cons and gazed into our crystal ball to try and predict what our future would look like under each scenario. In the end we decided to take a buyout package and made the leap into retirement from the company that had employed me for 30 years. At the ripe old age of 48, I became a retiree. This stage in life had come to us 7 years earlier than we had planned and accelerated many of our plans.

Many of our friends and family had shared the opinion that we would soon become bored with the retired life and either go stir crazy or run back into the fold of the gainfully employed. We did flirt with running our own business for a brief time, a notable failure which made us realize that we were actually glad not to have succeeded. 

We have now been retired for 2 years and have so far had no problems with boredom.  We decided to write a blog to share how we stay occupied and some of the lessons we have learned to make our early retirement a success.