I retired this year, on May 17, 2023. My day of liberation.

What’s it like to be retired? Well, I’ll tell ya. It’s no picnic. It’s much better than a picnic.

For me, the decision to retire was easy because I was done with the corporate grind, even though my last stint was about as good as a corporate job can get. Having been laid off in 2011 from my previous job as a senior writer for an investment firm, I thought my corporate life was over at the age of 51. I had read so many articles about middle-aged men getting the axe from corporate life and then falling down a long, slow, tumbling path into a meaningless life of financial struggle. It was pretty scary. At that point, I was too young to retire but too old to be re-hired – just like all the people I had read about. Fortunately, my company gave me a year severance. Not because I was a big shot, but because they felt I kind of had the goods on them, which I suppose I did. With the right sleazy lawyer, I could have made a case. But that’s not who I am. I saw the year off as a much-needed break from what had been five of the most stressful years of my life. Starting in November 2006, when my brother died suddenly, to ten months later, when my dad passed away, to three months after that, when my marriage blew up (and that was just during the first of the five years!), I had entered that part of life when the random acts of the universe start whupping you upside the head. That was followed by the Divorce From Hell, which lasted the next four years and accounted for most of their hellishness. But not to whine about my divorce…if you ask most people who have been through it, you realize that yours is only the “average” Divorce From Hell.

During my year of sabbatical (2012 – I was laid off on October 31, 2011), I spent most of my time looking for a new job. Came close a few times, but no luck. So for resume purposes – and to give me something else to do – I decided to be a freelance writer. I started this blog, which has netted me exactly $0 since its inception a dozen years ago, and I began a memoir, in which I spent 40,000+ words describing my childhood, teens and twenties. I can’t even go back to read it…but maybe I will at some point. I must have been really bored in those coffee shops. Fortunately, during this year of rowing, relaxation and abject terror, I was actually able to bank some serious coin. I collected unemployment for the entire year, thanks to a technicality in which, apparently, if you are out of a job but collecting severance payments, you are still out of a job. As long as I jumped through the hoops (attending job search seminars, proving I was looking for work, etc.), I was able to collect unemployment income on top of my severance. So I dutifully showed up and, like George Costanza in Seinfeld, convinced them that my impending interview as a latex salesman with Van Delay Industries constituted effort. In fact, one of my actual ideas was to be a coffee importer, and I attended a huge coffee trade show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. When asked my company name, I came up with the moniker “VII Imports.” For a couple of reasons. First, the letters VII stand for Van Delay Industries, Inc. And second, “Seven” was the incredibly brilliant name that George wanted to use for his and Susan’s first child, much to Susan’s dismay. Yes, I admit that my life has been just a tad influenced by Seinfeld.

As the end of my severance payments approached, the final date of October 31st loomed large and terrifying. I was nowhere nearer to landing a job, and the uncertainty of my future weighed heavily upon me. Especially as I now had a mortgage on top of my mandatory child support payments, having bought a condo about a month before my layoff. Oh yeah, I also had an $800/month car payment. About a year before our split, I bought a new car. I had cash in the bank when I walked in. I got a great price. But the salesman slipped one past me. “Why pay for the car now, when you can invest that money at 4 or 5% and get a loan at zero interest?” I wasn’t prepared for this. I had never thought about it before. And I didn’t have a crystal ball for the continued hell that life would present for me. But for those who would like some education from my experience, let me tell you a hard and fast rule of life. Money today is always worth more than money tomorrow. Because you never know what’s going to happen in the future. In this case the “future” money was actually a lack of debt. Same principle. The only time you take the time/money tradeoff risk is when investing, and if you do that, it’s important to understand the risks. Anyway, I locked myself into an $800 monthly payment for many years. Huge mistake, in hindsight. (The next lesson is, if a salesman is trying to talk you into something, it’s good for them, not for you.)

There’s an interesting segment in the 1899 book by Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” known for, among other things, the idea of “conspicuous consumption,” in which people show off their brand new cars in their driveways, or put the box for their new TV out by the trash several days early – just to stick it to their suburban neighbors (they don’t do this in the city). He noted that wealthy people, when their finances are going down the tubes, don’t cut back on spending, which would be the logical thing to do. Rather, they pour it on and go for broke. Maybe they’re trying to escape from reality. This may have been part of my thinking when I decided, suddenly, in mid-October 2012, to pursue a fantasy I had dreamed about for years. The idea was to put my boat, a single-scull rowing shell, on top of my car and drive around the country, rowing wherever I could and maybe taking in a race or two. The Head of the Schuykill – a 3-mile race in Philadelphia – would be held at the end of the month, and that could be my first stop. Logically, this was insane thinking. I still had no job and no prospects.

So I did. I traveled solo around the U.S. and wrote 15 blogs about it for row2k.com. I received a nominal payment, which allowed me to tell people I was a “professional” writer. (For more information, the blogs are all on this web site under the “rowing” tab.)

I returned in December 2012. Before long it was 2013. I was now out of work with zero income, and I had spent a good amount of my savings. My monthly obligations, including child support, mortgage, health insurance for my kids and me, totaled close to $5,000 before food. Did I mention I had no income? My COBRA payments alone were about $1,850. Plus that lovely little $800 for my car. You don’t need an MBA (I have one) to realize that this is not a sustainable business model. Oh, and I had broken up with my girlfriend while I was on my trip, so that didn’t help much. “And then,” as Bill Murray said in Stripes, “depression set in.”

I have a rowing buddy I’ve been training with for the past 21 years. He loves to verbally abuse me – and physically abuse me in rowing practice. I don’t take it personally, because he verbally abuses pretty much everyone. He also beats most people in races. He loves to tell me that the way I’m running my life is completely wrong. Which I can usually tolerate because he does raise some points. But the funny thing is that, during times of personal crisis, he has actually come through for me. He has a somewhat strange, ass-kicking kind of way of doing it, but it helps – usually a lot. In this case, when I was wallowing in the near-certainty that my life was over at age 52, and he saw me sulking for several months, he finally told me to get off my stupid ass and go over to Community Rowing Inc. (CRI), where perhaps I could get a job as a part-time coach, or sweep the floors, or something. CRI is where I had learned to row, and they were only about 10 minutes from my house. At the very least, he pointed out, it would get me out of the house. Amazingly, that advice led me to become a freelance grant writer in CRI’s development office, and, after only a month of so doing, it became a full-time position – with benefits. I could now say goodbye to the $1800/month COBRA payment for health insurance. I had a modest salary and a place to go every morning. I was, as George would say, back in business, baby. These kinds of friends are good to have.

After a year at CRI, I miraculously got a job at another investment firm in May 2014. Same job… senior writer. I stayed there for nine years, which amazed me as much as anyone.

And then, I retired.