Reasons to Quit (Retire ASAP)
The Prose About the Cons of Working Until You Drop
I feel prompted to write this as a rebuttal to an article I read today. The title of the article:
…is actually the polar opposite of the point the article makes, namely that you should keep on working on into geezerhood. In other words, I agree with the (misleading) title, and I’ll tell you why.
First, though, I’ll say this: if you love your job and feel that you don’t have anything better to do than keep working after you could viably retire, go for it.Working for someone else longer than I have to is not for me. I retired as soon as I could — the very day I turned 62 was my last day as a wage slave (your earliest age to retire and receive social security benefits depends on what year you were born — for those born in 1958 such as me, 62 is the earliest; those born later may have to wait longer).
The common “wisdom” promoted by “experts” is that you should keep working until you reach the age at which you’ll receive the largest amount on your social security check. This is specious reasoning, though, from my point of view. After all, if you don’t take your money as soon as you can, you are not saving it for later, as some imply — it’s simply gone, vanished in the proverbial puff of smoke.
In my case, my monthly social security check, plus the money I save on fuel and other transportation costs (“wear and tear” on the car) by not having to commute back and forth to work each day is not much less than I was bringing in on my last job.
So, by taking my retirement (social security) “early” (right on time according to my way of thinking) rather than waiting five years to get a slightly larger monthly amount, I will amass over $100,000 in social security payments.
If I had waited until I was 67 to begin collecting my benefits, the extra couple of hundred per month would never make up for the hundred grand I would have lost out on. How long would it take to break even, had I waited? At a couple thousand per year more with the higher amount, it would take about fifty years, in other words when I hit 117 years of age or so I would finally make up for postponing the social security payments for five years. Is that a good gamble, do you think — namely, that I would still be collecting social security at 117 years “young” and that social security will even still exist as a viable and reliable source of income? I think not, in both cases.
Even if you include the difference between what I would have earned each month had I kept working as opposed to what I get on social security plus what I save by not driving my car to work every day, it would probably take 25 years to break even; in other words, I would be 92 on that black letter day. That’s a gamble I’m not willing to take. I always worked to live; I never lived to work.
There are other considerations, too, advantages (for me, anyway) of retiring right on time (as soon as I could), namely 1) Peace of mind, 2) Quality of Life, and 3) “Opportunity Cost”:
1. Peace of Mind: If I was still “working for the man,” I would be more stressed out, frustrated, and irritated than I am with a boss I see eye to eye with when I gaze into the mirror.
Quality of Life: My average daily experience (my life, in other words) is much more pleasant now; for example, although I usually wake up early anyway on my own, I hate, abhor, despise, loathe, detest having to wake up to an alarm clock — even the threat of that infernal racket ruining my natural rest is highly irritating. After all, if you are jolted awake by an alarm going off, by definition you didn’t get enough sleep (if you had gotten enough, you would have awakened on your own without that rude and raucous din).
Opportunity Cost: If I had to travel back and forth to work each day and spend the best part of the day there, that would keep me from doing what I want to do and/or find more important. I would have missed out on five years of relative freedom. Also, there’s a greater chance of being maimed or even killed in an auto accident with all that extra motoring (had I continued slaving away in the salt mines).
Don’t get me wrong; work is great. But it’s infinitely preferable to choose your own work rather than be forced to do something you may not enjoy or view as intrinsically valuable.
Of course, everyone’s circumstances differ, but for me, I would have been an utter fool to continue working just so that I could get a little more on my social security check five years later, a “boon” that would have never really panned out anyway, as delineated above.
After all, nobody ever lamented on their deathbed, “I should have spent more time at the office!”
I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist (who does?), but I wonder: who benefits by tricking people into working more years than they have to?