Friday, September 02, 2011

Why I'm Re-retiring

In a couple months, I will return to my retirement life.  I've learned a lot from unretiring and doing a temporary full time job.  However, in June, I turned down an offer to make it a permanent full time job.  Although the economy is still poor, I'm pretty sure I made the right decision.  Here are my reasons:

  • It wasn't fun enough.  The great thing about retirement is that I can work jobs that I consider fun.  Like most real jobs, this one had good days and bad days.  There just weren't enough fun days :-)  


  • I lost my summer, again. Last summer, I was over committed due to multiple part time jobs.  As a result, I worked too many hours over the summer.  I don't plan to lose another summer to work.


  • Money wasn't sufficient motivation.  The pay will cover about 110% of our annual budget.  Even if the pay covered 200% of our annual budget, I wouldn't keep the job.  Even if I was paid $1 million per year,  I would probably only work about 6 - 9 months and then retire again :-)


  • Become used to stock market volatility.   I used to do work as a hedge against the stock market volatility.  However, after two years of working hard to reduce our withdrawal rate, I realized a $2 increase in my company stock will exceed any annual salary, including the current job.  I've modified our savings and retirement portfolio to mitigate the effects of volatility.


  • Not enough work that leveraged my strengths.  I enjoy jobs where I can leverage my strengths and not deal with my weaknesses.  I have that option with most of my part time jobs.  In this full time job, I needed to do work in areas where I wasn't particularly strong.   While I the experience was good, I am no longer am interested personal development plans to improve my work skills.


  • For now, I plan to return to the three part time seasonal jobs I've been doing.  However, I will probably drop at least one of these jobs in the next couple years. 
     
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