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Oh, it’s Saturday
Oh, it’s Saturday
High nigh nighny and a ha cha cha
—Spanky, upon discovering that the weekend has arrived and he doesn’t have to go to school

Our Aussie blogger friend Frog Dancer Jones is retiring next week. Bully for her! She’s a wonderful person, and she really does deserve to own one hundred percent of her time.

Well, in honor of her pending emancipation, I thought it would be nice to show her what she can expect from ditching the 9-to-5 world and diving headlong into early retirement. Here we go.

Every Day Is Saturday

The below video perfectly sums up the eternal beauty of early retirement. Every day is freaking Saturday.

Mrs. Groovy and I have been retired for four years now. And we still get up every morning and sing, “High nigh nighny and a ha cha cha.” Yep, owning one hundred percent of your time is that exhilarating. No rush-hour commutes to suffer. No pointless tasks to complete. No idiotic bosses to please. Our days are ours to seize or waste. We can be energetic ants or lollygagging grasshoppers. And that degree of autonomy has yet to get old.

And of all our Saturdays, Sunday is our favorite. Why? Well, despite the angelic face we put forward on this blog, Mrs. Groovy and I are far from angels. And Sunday night is the perfect time to allow our inner malice to surface. We just love to sit on our couch and gloat while sipping adult beverages and binge-watching The Block. For come Monday, millions of our fellow Americans will be starting another week of 9-to-5 hell and we won’t. Suckers!

You Naturally Crave Structure

Man does not live by hedonism alone. If all you do is slake your base desires, you will soon find yourself with a shabby mind, body, and soul. Not good. In the words of the immortal Dean Wormer, “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.”

So how does one avoid a shabby mind, body, and soul in retirement? Well, for starters, you put some structure in your life—meaningful structure. You designate certain blocks of time in your day for doing things that nourish the “better angels of your nature.” Here, for instance, is how I structure my mornings, Monday through Saturday.

  • 6:30 am to 8:30 am: Make my bed, answer emails, and write amazing blog posts.
  • 8:30 am to 9:30 am: Workout.
  • 9:30 am to 10:30 am: Walk three miles with Mrs. Groovy.

And that’s all the structure I have in my life. I’m freewheeling after 10:30 am, Monday through Saturday. And I’m freewheeling all day Sunday.

Is that enough structure? I think so. Remember: the objective here is not to make your early retirement as productive and stressful as your working days. The objective here is to make sure your mind, body, and soul don’t turn to mush. And I’ve found that four hours of structure, six days a week, is enough to beat back the forces of decay.

You Naturally Crave Purpose

Another way to make sure your mind, body, and soul don’t turn to mush in early retirement is to have a purpose. And it doesn’t have to be anything grandiose. It just has to be something that you enjoy and makes your community a little less nasty, a little less brutish. Here, for example, are three things that are currently bringing purpose to my life.

  1. Fostering dogs (a new-found purpose thanks to Mrs. Groovy).
  2. Picking up litter.
  3. And making Groovy Ranch the number one attraction in Louisburg, North Carolina, by constructing a life-sized scrap-metal Bison that will one day next Spring be planted on our front lawn.

Quick aside: I’m making nice progress on the bison build. Here are some pictures of the beast’s head.

Becky Sue’s right profile
Front of Becky Sue’s lovely face
Becky Sue’s left profile
Close-up of Becky Sue’s mouth

You Can’t Avoid Loneliness

Perhaps the biggest downside to early retirement is that most if not all of your family and friends are still working. So this means no one will be able to hang out with you before 5 pm on weekdays and no one will be able to do mid-week getaways with you. Loneliness will thus be an unfortunate side-effect of your early retirement.

You Got to Force Yourself to Spend

Finally, another downside to early retirement is that you will find it difficult to spend money. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. After all, one doesn’t find oneself in early retirement if one spent the previous couple of decades flexing one’s spending muscles and totally neglecting one’s frugality muscles.

So how does one start pumping one’s spending muscles in early retirement? Here’s a suggestion.

Recalibrate the four-percent rule every two years, and if your new safe-withdrawal rate is larger, increase your annual spending by fifty percent of the difference. Here’s an example.

Year One of Early Retirement

Investment portfolio: $1,000,000
Safe-withdrawal rate (portfolio amount x .04): $40,000
Annual spending budget: $40,000

Year Three of Early Retirement

Investment portfolio: $1,200,000
Safe-withdrawal rate (portfolio amount x .04): $48,000
New annual spending budget: $44,000

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. I hope you join me in congratulating FDJ on her well-deserved early retirement. And if there’s anything else that FDJ should be expecting from early retirement, please let her know. Peace.

12 thoughts on “What to Expect from Early Retirement

  1. Great points Mr. G and love your progress on Becky Sue!

    Congrats FDJ on your early retirement. One additional thought to consider – “what are you retiring to”.

    By default, we tend to focus on “retiring from”. As wonderful as the freedom of time is, it can also be a double edged sword.

    Too much of a good thing can grow stale. Explore your passions and consider what will keep you engaged and motivated.
    Shannon@RetiresGreat recently posted…On with The Butter – An Unbiased Book ReviewMy Profile

    1. You clearly haven’t read my blog, haha!
      I’ve been preparing for retirement for years.
      Going through one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, where for 12 weeks or so we were only allowed to leave our homes for 4 reasons, and then not go more than 5kms away unless we had a permit made me realise that yes – I love being at home and no – I won’t be bored. There’s always so much to do – I have lots of hobbies and dogs. 🙂
      I’ll probably miss the banter with the kids and colleagues, but that’s a small price to pay.
      The really satisfying thing I realised, as I raised a glass to myself at the end of my last teaching day, was that I can look back on my career and feel satisfied that I was really good at it. Kids always loved my classes and I taught them well. (Having the idea to write Dad jokes on the board at the start of every English class was genius – I only wish I’d thought of it sooner.)

      1. I love it, FDJ. Competency in something worthwhile = extreme happiness. The loss of your school district is our gain. How’s Australia doing these days re the coronavirus?

        1. Victoria, after going through one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, has now passed 50 days of no cases, no deaths.
          Pretty much the only thing we do now is to wear masks when inside crowded shopping centres, supermarkets etc.
          Life’s good. Fingers crossed some idiot doesn’t stuff it up.

    2. Thank you, Shannon. Excellent points to consider when approaching retirement. If you don’t enter retirement with the why figured out, things can get boring fast.

  2. Spanky is something new! He’s definitely not an Aussie thing. It made me laugh! I saw this at 3AM this morning when I woke up in the middle of the night. We’re in summer here and the night is warm.

    I taught my last class yesterday – a yr 9 Drama class. I asked them which Theatre Sports games they liked and so we had roughly an hour laughing and having so much fun! It was a terrific way to close this chapter of my life.

    Now I have a week of meetings about planning for next year to sit through – and a Christmas luncheon where I’ll get to make my farewell speech. I’m going to enjoy that!

    I have a feeling that most of my days will start with a walk on the beach with the dogs. I’ll have to find the sweet spot between where the early morning dog walkers have gone home to get ready for work and the young mums are still getting their kids off to primary school. Should have the beach practically to ourselves.

    By the way, I love Becky-Sue’s eyeballs.

    1. I’m so happy for you, FDJ. I know you’re going to have a kick-ass retirement. Any chance of you jumping across the pond and visiting America?

  3. Far be it from me to gainsay what works for you, but I find that deferring email and the like until after I’ve finished some accomplishment leading toward one of my night-before objectives. I work best (in retirement) when I jot down the next day’s primary accomplishment. And read it first thing next morning.

    1. I hear ya about the email, my friend. I normally don’t check email till late in the day, if at all. But I’ve been bouncing ideas of my very smart brother-in-law and sister-in-law, and that’s the email I’m referring to. Answering their emails is a form of mental calisthenics.

  4. This is great. I love how you structure time so that you’re free after 10am. After 2 1/2 years or retirement, my structure has come in different forms. First, we rode our bicycles halfway across the US for 3 months. Structure there was get up, eat, ride your bike, eat second breakfast, ride some more, stop, set up camp, sleep. Take a rest day every so often. Repeat. Pretty sweet.
    Now we’re moved in to our new place, We’ve put a lot of sweat equity into site prep and our house which has provided endless opportunities to structure time. It gets old occasionally, but every task and every hour worked directly benefits us, not some policy or process or stooge in an upper-level position trying to earn his bonus. I’ve gotten to flex my Tim the Tool Man muscles for the first time in many years, and we’re both is great shape. Who needs crossfit with all of this free exercise? I can’t wait to install the squat bench and pull up bar in the garage!

    Becky Sue’s looking great! I always like seeing her progress. What a huge, impressive project. And congrats on fostering dogs. It’s a good cause. One of our neighbors in the project adopted a dog with a troubled past and she’s doing very well.

    Congratulations to FDJ on your retirement. If you’re like the Groovys or the Gumbys or Fritz or many others, you won’t regret it.

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