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A Year of Early Retirement
Jun. 23rd, 2008 01:29 pmJust when I start thinking, hey, I can deal with my job, something else happens. For example, last Monday I learned of a plan which, if it is enacted, would result in almost the entire remainder of my original job duties being transferred to someone else (who I would train). In other words, 95% of my job duties would be "other duties as assigned."
And just when I started thinking that maybe I could be okay with these other duties, even though I never would have asked for them, I learn that there is a plan to re-build the entire degree audit system "from the ground up" in the next three to five years as a web-based system. Right now it is a mainframe system with a web interface, meaning that you can do data entry very quickly, but then you can access the results from anywhere: the best of both worlds. Now they want to make data entry all about "please wait" and, if the pattern from the last two re-do projects holds, they're not going to try to use the process to improve the system in any way.
And today I found out that it's quite possible that the person who has decided this, and brought this up as a reason not to spend any time working on our current system, may not actually have any idea of just how huge that project would be.
I'm fantasizing about the idea of quitting even if I don't have a job lined up.
I just read that half the staff where I work are baby boomers. Since people think the baby boomer period now extends from 1945 all the way to 1964, that includes me. Which means by the time I can retire, there will probably be a huge shortage of labor, and they're going to be begging us to keep working. So the smart thing to do would be to retire now, and then get a job when I'm older and it's a worker's market. I can't quite imagine doing that.
But I've begun toying with the idea of taking a year of early retirement, sort of like my friend chikuru did.
If I wait to do this until January 15, 2008, and get another job with the same pension plan within 15 months, I wouldn't even lose any pension benefits except for having a good salary during the 08-09 and perhaps 09-10 fiscal year(s).
If there is more than one day between these jobs, they would cash out my vacation time, which would come to about two months pay.
And I could access $30,000 from my Roth IRA tax free and with no penalty (the rest of the money in there is from earnings and has strings attached).
There are only two little problems with this idea. The first problem is that I would need to get a job afterwards. I am not good at getting jobs; there is certainly no guarantee that I could find one in fifteen months. Plus, I don't want to job hunt the whole fifteen months; I want to be "retired" some of that time.
If I were in one of those success story articles, then the things I did during my retirement, like volunteer at a school and audit a class, would lead to contacts that would lead to my next job. I'm always reading about people who get laid off and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to them. Of course some other people get laid off and then can't find another job, start drinking, lose their house, get divorced, and die in the gutter. Of course those guys don't get interviewed for articles; they are too dead.
My other little problem is money. Supposedly I'm rather frugal, but when it comes down to it, I spend every last penny of my paycheck each month. Officially, I save a fair amount, but none of those savings are for an unemployment savings account. And am I suddenly going to stop wanting to have a car? To pay off my house? To eat daily? No.
My current passive monthly income consists of about $15 in interest and maybe $8 in dividends. That's not quite going to let me live in the manner to which I've become accustomed.
My friend did it, why can't I? Well, it might help if I paid my house off first, acquired a working spouse, and had contacts for jobs I might actually like. Of course by the time I can get all those things, I could retire for good.
And just when I started thinking that maybe I could be okay with these other duties, even though I never would have asked for them, I learn that there is a plan to re-build the entire degree audit system "from the ground up" in the next three to five years as a web-based system. Right now it is a mainframe system with a web interface, meaning that you can do data entry very quickly, but then you can access the results from anywhere: the best of both worlds. Now they want to make data entry all about "please wait" and, if the pattern from the last two re-do projects holds, they're not going to try to use the process to improve the system in any way.
And today I found out that it's quite possible that the person who has decided this, and brought this up as a reason not to spend any time working on our current system, may not actually have any idea of just how huge that project would be.
I'm fantasizing about the idea of quitting even if I don't have a job lined up.
I just read that half the staff where I work are baby boomers. Since people think the baby boomer period now extends from 1945 all the way to 1964, that includes me. Which means by the time I can retire, there will probably be a huge shortage of labor, and they're going to be begging us to keep working. So the smart thing to do would be to retire now, and then get a job when I'm older and it's a worker's market. I can't quite imagine doing that.
But I've begun toying with the idea of taking a year of early retirement, sort of like my friend chikuru did.
If I wait to do this until January 15, 2008, and get another job with the same pension plan within 15 months, I wouldn't even lose any pension benefits except for having a good salary during the 08-09 and perhaps 09-10 fiscal year(s).
If there is more than one day between these jobs, they would cash out my vacation time, which would come to about two months pay.
And I could access $30,000 from my Roth IRA tax free and with no penalty (the rest of the money in there is from earnings and has strings attached).
There are only two little problems with this idea. The first problem is that I would need to get a job afterwards. I am not good at getting jobs; there is certainly no guarantee that I could find one in fifteen months. Plus, I don't want to job hunt the whole fifteen months; I want to be "retired" some of that time.
If I were in one of those success story articles, then the things I did during my retirement, like volunteer at a school and audit a class, would lead to contacts that would lead to my next job. I'm always reading about people who get laid off and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to them. Of course some other people get laid off and then can't find another job, start drinking, lose their house, get divorced, and die in the gutter. Of course those guys don't get interviewed for articles; they are too dead.
My other little problem is money. Supposedly I'm rather frugal, but when it comes down to it, I spend every last penny of my paycheck each month. Officially, I save a fair amount, but none of those savings are for an unemployment savings account. And am I suddenly going to stop wanting to have a car? To pay off my house? To eat daily? No.
My current passive monthly income consists of about $15 in interest and maybe $8 in dividends. That's not quite going to let me live in the manner to which I've become accustomed.
My friend did it, why can't I? Well, it might help if I paid my house off first, acquired a working spouse, and had contacts for jobs I might actually like. Of course by the time I can get all those things, I could retire for good.