My advice to everyone is always do it as soon as you can and are comfortable with it. I had suffered two major heart attacks in one year during a major merger by our company. I thought about retiring then my wife was 9 years from retirement and I was only 50 and wanted to build for a long retirement. My new job was totally self directed and pretty independent, so I decided to stay until I though I was ready. I ended up staying until I was 58 and my wife reached retirement age of 55. The last three years I became obsessed with the game of "Do I have enough?" I ran simulations on Fidelity's Monte Carlo simulator until I was blue in the face. One Thursday morning in April, I stopped for breakfast then went on to work. I parked in the lot of our office, listened to the radio while I enjoyed the perfect spring morning and opened the door to go in. I sat there a minute and realized I really wanted to go fishing and I was worrying myself to death about how much future money I would be leaving to my kids instead if I had enough to enjoy the rest of my life. I went in to the office, submitted my papers and took a day's vacation to go bluegill fishing. I worked until August 1 of that year and retired the same day as my wife. We physically moved to Lexington that spring but still had our old house, which we sold that summer. We retired on the first, got up the next morning with the last of our posessions packed in a small box trailer, stopped at the realtors to close on the old house and drove out of town. Best trip we ever made.
Dean is right. I have told people continually that I have less free time than I did while working. That was 17 years ago and a huge portion of the good memories of my life are from that period. Most of the health and old age issues I have started developing began at about the time I reached normal retirement age. I am thankful every day that we made the decision when we did to be able to enjoy that early retirement period to the maximum.
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