Let me start this blog by telling you a little bit about who I am and what I think this blog is about.

I am a father to three great daughters and a grandfather to my grandson. My first daughter lives on the coast, but my two youngest daughters and my grandson live with me in Central California. I am not an Empty Nester, yet. I may soon be. My youngest has finished her masters degree and is moving out of state to work on a PHD. My middle daughter is finishing her education to be an Ultrasound Technician and will start her career this fall. At some point in the future she and my grandson will move out to start her adult life. I am in no hurry to be an Empty Nester.

I like to read Stephen King and John Grisham and classics like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Music has been important to me since I discovered rock in the late sixties and progressive rock in the early seventies. I listen to Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes, Steven Wilson and The Doobie Brothers and The Cure. I like drinking wine, especially big, bold reds from Justin and Daou in the Paso Robles area. I have a weakness for the design and feel of German sports cars. I discovered hiking when I moved to California and I routinely hike the southern Sierras, the national parks and deserts like Anza Borrego.

I started traveling as soon as I graduated from college and had a paycheck. I went to several places in Mexico, Hawaii and numerous ski resorts around the west. When my girls were old enough to travel we went to Disneyland, San Diego and Vegas (yes it is kid friendly). I made my first trip to Europe in 2003, to Italy, and later had the opportunity to go to England and Ireland for a training program. I took my oldest daughter to England on one of the trips, then to Ireland; she has the travel bug and has taken solo trips to Italy and Thailand. When my girls were older we went to Hawaii, Alaska and Park City. We have hiked, skied, snorkeled, zip-lined, tubed and had many other experiences on our trips. Travel is an important part of my family’s lifestyle, and I always have a good camera with me.

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I grew up in Texas. I planned to live and retire there, but the oil industry had other plans for me. I moved to California for a three-year assignment in the 1980s. I have been here for almost forty years. Work and a paycheck brought me here. The Sierras, Pacific Ocean, deserts and the weather keep me here (though it is 109 degrees outside as I write this!). I am thankful the oil industry moved me to California and provided a good income to raise my girls.

My parents taught me the way to success was to get a degree in one of the “Big Three”professions from a good university, get a high-paying position with a big, stable company that offered great benefits and a retirement program; put in forty years; retire with a gold watch and pension; and then live the life I wanted to live. They were especially adamant about this plan when they didn’t have as much money as they needed to live the lifestyle they wanted.

That’s what I did. I did what my parents taught me, though I kicked and screamed as I entered college and continued to kick and scream throughout my long career.

I graduated with an engineering degree from a large southern university. I’m not sure how nineteen year old me decided to major in engineering. I didn’t like math or science, but that is a story for a novel I am working on. I went to work in the oil industry, the highest paying industry when I graduated. I didn’t quite make it forty years and I did not work for one company. But the companies I worked for paid well (to those who survived the numerous layoffs) and they provided good health care benefits and retirement programs.

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I entered the workforce planning for the day I would retire, especially a few years into my career when I discovered the path I had taken wasn’t a good match for me. I contributed as much as the IRS or the company allowed to retirement plans and 401(k)s. I saved outside the tax-deferred accounts. I learned about the stock market and invested in aggressive companies for the long-term. I wanted to reach “My Number,” the amount of money I needed to save to get out of 8 to 5 as soon as possible to live the life I wanted. I spent much of my career looking towards the future, probably at the expense of not spending enough time in the present. I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to leaving Corporate America.

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To be honest, even though I talked about retiring often, I don’t know if I would have ever reached “My Number.” Most experts recommend saving enough money to provide the same income you had while working to maintain your pre-retirement lifestyle. That was a big number. The longer I worked, the more my career progressed, the more money I earned, the more I needed to save to replace my paycheck. How ironic. The more money I made, the more raises and promotions I received, the more I needed to save and invest. Number creep. “My Number” kept getting bigger and further away over the years. There was another problem too. I was more addicted to the two paychecks I received monthly than I had ever been to any of things my friends and I swallowed when we were young. I wasn’t sure I could go cold turkey.

As my peers and I neared retirement we asked, “how long until you retire?” and the answer always seemed to be “two to three years.” One friend told me he was retiring in two to three years for almost a decade. That could have easily been my fate.

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Fortunately, I worked in a commodity industry, and commodities go through boom and bust cycles. When oil prices rise, the industry could be a fun place to work. Companies spent a lot of money, hired a lot of new employees, and increased salaries and bonuses. However, when price fell, the bust periods were brutal. Price declines were usually faster and more dramatic than price increases, and the busts seemed to last much longer than the booms.

When the bottom fell out of the market the big oil company’s patterns of behavior were well known:

• cut activities, which caused the service companies to fire employees;

• cut discretionary costs further;

• offer enticing severance packages to retirement-eligible employees to get them to leave voluntarily;

• then layoff employees, with severance packages, to reach overhead reduction goals; and

• wait out the storm until oil prices rise, and if the bust lasts longer than expected, repeat the previous steps.

I went through three boom and bust cycles the first thirty years of my career. I did not meet the criteria for enhanced voluntary retirement when packages were offered, but I was offered voluntary packages. I accepted the first two, intending to leave the industry, only to be lured back by a paycheck. I rejected the third package without consequence. A fourth package was on the horizon.

The market collapsed again in 2014 and this time I was close to retirement. I had twenty years of service and I was more than fifty-five years old; I met the criteria to be retirement eligible and receive a voluntary package if the company offered one. I wasn’t at “My Number” and the package wasn’t going to get me to it, so I debated whether I would accept one. I estimated I had two to three years left until I could retire.

The company took two years to cut activities, reduce discretionary spending, evaluate the strategic direction forward (e.g. how many people they needed to run the business) and offer voluntary packages. The package was good, but not good enough to reach my number. I wanted to start living the life I wanted to live now, but I had a sophomore in college and my youngest was a high school senior heading to an expensive University of California school. I had two college educations to pay for. I didn’t enjoy the work, and the environment in the building would be depressing after layoffs and continuous cost cutting for the foreseeable future was not fun work.

Then better sense prevailed. I realized I did not want to finish my career in a down cycle, spending long days looking for ways to cut costs. I didn’t want to work in a place that many of my friends had left, by choice or forced to leave; the morale was always so low after layoffs. I knew if I turned the package down management could tell me I was retiring anyway with a smaller package.

My company paid me to retire. After a thirty-eight year career I left Corporate America almost seven years ago. I received an Apple Watch as a parting gift. If they had not paid me to leave I would’ve continued to work “a little while longer” to reach a number that kept getting bigger, like many of my work friends did.

Time to live life the way I really wanted to.

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I didn’t plan to have a conventional retirement. I wasn’t going to ride off into the sunset to play golf five days a week or create a new job as a volunteer. I didn’t have grandchildren (at the time) so I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time with grandkids like many of my friends did. I still had two girls at home and I planned to spend time with them while they were still home. I planned to exercise a lot, to read at least fifty books a year, to listen to music regularly and to learn to speak Spanish. Travel was one of my top priorities. I had big plans for all the extra time I would have without my 8 to 5. I wanted to combine my love for photography with traveling. I planned to hike the local mountains, sit on beaches, go wine tasting in Paso Robles and set foot on at least five continents.

Retirement was more to me than leisure and recreation, though I planned for a lot of that too. I didn’t call it retirement. It was the next act, which included the next career. Retirement wasn’t about quitting work, it was about doing the work I wanted to do without having to earn money. For me that work was writing novels. I started and stopped writing several novels during my career, but I let other priorities and responsibilities stop me from completing them. I was going to complete at least one or more of my novels in the next act.

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I love this stage of life. I wish I had been able to do it when I was thirty or forty rather than waiting until I was 59-11/12. At least I get to experience it. I have a lot of time and freedom to do what I want to do. I like not having to work for a paycheck. I spend more time in the present than looking to the future. I get to spend time with my girls and grandson. I traveling more than I did when I worked, but it is still never enough. I read and listen to music during the day rather sit in a conference room for an endless stream of meetings.

The next act has been great, but I don’t want to give you the impression that is has been a simple transition. There was no On/Off switch. The change from forty years of structured behavior to an almost completely unstructured life was huge. It took work to make that transition, at least for me, and six years later my next act is still a work in progress. Friends that didn’t take the package asked me what I was going to do when I retired. I told them my list of things I was going to do. I didn’t realize that I also needed to have a list of things I needed to undo.

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I’ll end this post here. The AI* says I have exceeded the optimum number of words for this kind of post. I will follow this up soon with a second post to describe what I think this blog is about.

* Just kidding about the AI. I did ask Chat GPT about the length of blog posts, but I didn’t use it to write this post and don’t plan to use it to write them, though I am curious about the technology and will be exploring how to use it. For now, this blog was completely written by a human being.