I Retired Two Month Ago: Here's How It's Going

 

After years of talking about it, I finally retired at the age of 50 on October 31, 2025.  Now that it is two months later, it's fair to ask how things are going.  I mean, I don't have a boss anymore so I guess the blog is the place for my performance reviews now.

TL;DR: it's going awesome, better than I could ever have dreamed.

I know that retirement isn't always smooth sailing, and from what I remember, the "gotcha list" is: loss of purpose and identity, boredom, financial issues, and health insurance costs.  Here is my experience so far:

• Loss of purpose and identity.  My response: are you kidding me?????  
• I used to be very into work, but that ended somewhere around 2022.  I'm glad that I took a couple of years to think about leaving, and now that I'm here, I have confirmation of how little work meant to me.  Being a corporate accountant who specialized in payroll just wasn't motivating me to get out of bed in the morning anymore.
• It felt weird the first time that I said the words "I am retired" [to the border agent on my first retirement trip to Canada when he asked what my occupation was], but now it feels completely normal.  Pro tip that I picked up from Kyria is to always use the word "retired" instead of "unemployed" since the English language does not have a word for "I'm over that" for employment status.  Before I retired I avoided using the word and referred to it as "I'm taking some time off work", and now I own it.  The worst that is going to happen is that someone will think that I am 65 years old.
• Boredom.  To be fair, I did experience boredom during the few stints of unemployment that I had in my career.  However, I put a lot of time into thinking how I would use my time before I retired, and I have not been bored for one second since October 31, 2025.  More about that in a minute.
• Financial issues.  Lol.  
• In spite of what you may have heard on the news, the past two months have been excellent for the stock market as a whole, which is what I am mainly invested in.  My money has made far more money than I have spent.
• I don't follow a formal budget, but I know approximately how much money I spend and I give myself a monthly "paycheck" of 1/12th of that amount each month from my brokerage account.
• I've been investing for 30 years, and along with that comes investment vehicles that were common 30 years ago that are less favored now.  I have some old school mutual funds that generate dividends and capital gains at the end of the year, and it just so happened that this year the payout was almost exactly what I need for 2026 spending.  This is terrible from a tax perspective but very useful from a "I'm going to take money out of my brokerage account every month and I don't want to make a lot of decisions about which investment to take it from" perspective.
• Check back with me after we go into a market slump (which in spite of what you see on the news is a normal part of life) and see how I feel about money then, but for right now I much prefer having a paycheck that comes from me instead of from an employer.
• Health insurance.  I have a Sugar Daddy, so this is a non-issue.  "Sugar Daddy" = "an employed spouse".  Hey, I have a long history of being an insurance Sugar Mama, so what went around is now back around.

Let's talk about some other stuff:

Typical day plan vs reality

In my pre-game retirement post, I said that I was going to travel, and that I had very specific plans for what I would do when I was at home.  Check, and check.

• I actually didn't think that I would travel very much over the winter because the weather makes things dicey.  I ended up doing a few short trips, which was more than I thought.  The great thing about short trips is that they don't take a lot of planning.
• My Planned At Home Retirement Day was: get up when the Hubs gets up, work out, then go up to my home office and Learn Stuff, have lunch/walk the dog, and then Do Stuff in the afternoon.  This has proven to be exactly what happened, and it's a very enjoyable way to spend the day.
• The only adjustment that I've had to make are to Slow My Roll and to DNF subjects that aren't as interesting to learn about as I thought that they would be.
• Remember how I wanted to learn more about math?  I tried it and found that I was not into it.  That Photoshop tutorial that I did a long time ago and want to work my way back through?  Guess what, I got as far as opening the book and I just don't want to do it right now.
• On the other hand, learning Spanish has been mucho bueno.  What started as "it's just half an hour" has morphed into more like two hours on weekdays: 15-20 minutes on DuoLingo as a warm up, 30 minute audio Pimsleur lesson, and then it takes me about 15 minutes to do the Pimsleur exercises.  Then I started watching a 10 minute Spanish language YouTube video and doing more of the Pimsleur practice exercises, so it's basically another hour in the afternoons.  Look, I don't know if this will ever lead to me being able to understand and/or speak Spanish, but it's something that I enjoy doing.
• I need to be careful about managing my time, because the days go by pretty quickly.  I indulged in some extra couch rot time in November when I was sick and over the holidays, but even as a non-working person, my time is still limited.
• In a few weeks I will need to decide if I want to retest for the CPP (a fancy payroll certification that I have that expires at the end of 2026).  I was sure that I would want to do it, but now I'm less inclined.  The reasons to do it are to give me an edge if I ever wanted to go back to work and the bragging rights of doing something that's a bit difficult.  The reasons not to do it are that I am sure that I will never ever want to go back to work, I'm not that interested in bragging, it's expensive, and it will be a time and effort commitment for a few months.  I haven't fully written this off yet, but right now I'm thinking no.

Quality of Life

My quality of life and mental health are much improved since leaving work.  I always knew that it wasn't great that I spent most of my waking hours doing something that I did not like and was stressful, but hey, that's how adults spend their waking hours so why should I be any different.  Now that I'm out of it, I realize that my job was making me feel physically awful most of the time.  I literally could not concentrate at work, which I have to imagine is not great for brain health.

What Surprised Me the Most About Retirement So Far

I'm very picky about how I spend my time!  I didn't feel like I spent that much time on social media before I retired, but now I spend so much less.  I used to like LinkedIn for being able to keep up with my old coworkers, and now suddenly I can't be bothered.  I updated my profile to show the end date of my last job and added a blurb to my profile about being "on a break".  I check in every once in a while and think "this is a bunch of stuff that is none of my business" and leave.  Going on Instagram suddenly seems like a waste of time so I rarely do it.  I still use Facebook because it's a link some of my activities, but I don't feel compelled to read and like every post that I see.

Another related surprise that I guess isn't really that much of a surprise is that my alcohol use has gone way down.  I used to love kicking back with a beer, glass or wine, or margarita on weekend nights, or better yet two beers/glasses on those nights.  Now I rarely drink when we're at home, and only drink sometimes when we go out.

The Best Part of Being Retired

Spending my time doing things that I want to do instead of wishing I could do them!  I can't tell you how great it was to wake up on that first Monday in Ottawa and realize that I didn't have to check my work email and that my wrist wasn't going to be constantly buzzing from Slack notifications.  I had a similar epiphany on the Florida trip the day that I went to the Tallahassee Museum and found myself walking on a boardwalk in a wildlife preserve in the sun on a weekday afternoon.  

Even on a daily basis at home, that feeling when I get back from walking the dog at lunch and realize that I can just take a minute to do a crossword puzzle instead of rushing back to my desk is priceless.

The Most Overrated Part of Being Retired

Being able to grocery shop on weekdays!  Honestly, the stores are still pretty crowded and there isn't that much difference between shopping then or on weekends. It still feels like a chore.

Areas of Improvement

Yes, this is a performance review!  Here is what I need to improve, and it's not "be less of a perfectionist" which is what I always used to write on my "real" performance reviews when I was employed.

• Health is wealth.  I am not sleeping well and my eating habits are not great.  Plans are in motion and I will report back.  
• Socializing.  I am much more comfortable staying home and writing a blog than I am in getting out and hanging out with "civilians" (non-bloggers).  I'm working on finding a local tribe, which I kicked off before I retired by hanging out with people who do things that I like doing - a book club, a hiking group, and my local Choose FI group.  What I'm saying is that I've started down the path and I just need to keep doing it.  I have not been great about going to the hiking group, which is mostly due to the awful weather, but once spring gets here I will make it a point to be more of a regular.

My advice to other pre-FIREees*

*A pre-FIREee is someone who follows the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement and who is thinking that work isn't for them and has the money to put behind it.

• Yes take a hot minute to think about it.  Even though I wanted to leave work in mid-2023, I benefitted from having the extra time to mull it over.  I needed to do more work on planning the money situation and how I was going to spend my time.
• But also beware the "one more year rule", which is where people play it safe and decide that work really isn't that bad.  On paper I had a great job: fully remote, great salary, and incredible benefits.  As much as I hated work, it was a bit hard to say "nah I don't need that" and walk away.
• I found it helpful to "road test" my new life by telling my non-work IRL social network what I was planning, which I started doing about a year ago.  There was one person who was somewhat negative, which I put down to being about their financial situation and nothing to do with me, but overall people were very positive, which made me more excited to begin my new life and not fall into the "one more year" trap.
• Have fun now as much as possible, and do not put your life on hold until retirement.  I was able to do quite a bit of traveling before I retired, which is how I know that it's something that I want to do even more of now.  Even simple things like always taking a lunch break to walk the dog greatly increased my quality of life.

That's what I have to say about that!  More performance reviews to come.