Well, here's an announcement...

The day before yesterday, I retired.

Not a particularly exciting announcement for my readers, but, as you can imagine, a fairly significant one for me! Though it's a rather black-and-white statement for something which in fact involves rather more shades of grey. I decided that a binary transition from not-retired to retired was perhaps not entirely healthy, and so nearly two years ago, I informed my consultancy clients that I'd like to retire about now, and I've been gradually reducing my workload since then, until I was down to just one or two days per week.

I definitely recommend this approach, if you can do it. For one thing, it gave me confidence that I wasn't going to have any trouble filling my time when I was no longer working. And secondly, during that period, we've been living pretty much on the budget we expect to have in retirement, and have found it quite doable. Both of these make the transition much less scary than it might otherwise be!

If you had told me, in my youth, that I might retire before I even hit 60, I would have been surprised. I have always enjoyed my work, and been blessed with some great jobs and splendid colleagues, so I had no particular desire to leave that world behind. I've also spent most of my 'career' in start-ups or in junior part-time academic posts, which has made for a more modest income than that enjoyed by many of my friends, and correspondingly smaller pension contributions, never quite benefitting either from big corporate schemes or the (also often rather generous) ones enjoyed by many full-time long-term academics. So I assumed early retirement would be unaffordable for me.

But when it became apparent a few years back, to my surprise, that it was a real possibility, without either excessive luxury or frugality, I started to think about the trade-offs between time and money. I have always had many more hobbies than I have time to spend on them, and much as I've always enjoyed my work, I enjoy doing some of these even more! So I started doing a lot of reading, and YouTube-watching, on the subject of early retirement and retirement finance planning. Some of these had comments from people saying things like, "I retired in my early 50s and I'm so glad I did!", which made me feel a bit less decadent about considering it at my rather more advanced age.

There was also a persuasive argument I read somewhere that went roughly along these lines: If you retire in your mid-to-late 60s, as many people do, the chances are that you'll have 10-15 years of reasonable health; maybe rather more, if you're lucky. But if there are two of you, and you want to do things together, the probability that both of you will be fit and healthy drops significantly: perhaps the balance of probabilities might put it closer to 10 years. There's an acronym I've seen used by pension advisers: JOMY, which is short for the rather common 'Just One More Year' syndrome: "I'm going to retire very soon, but I think I'll give it just one more year before I do." If you consider that every 'just one more year' might take 10% of the time you have to enjoy significant retirement activities with your spouse... well, you can do the maths.

Anyway, all of the above explains, to some degree, why we are now in our little campervan, in unexpectedly glorious sunshine, just a short walk from the charming old harbour of Honfleur on the Normandy coast. And we're doing something which I've always wanted to do: leaving home for a vacation without knowing exactly when you'll be coming back...