We Quit Our Job Today

Alternate working title for this blog post was Synchronicity and the Art of Retirement, as well as I'm  Free!, but we'll let Mr. Daltry sing I'm Free and how often do you get the chance to title a post We Quit Our Job Today?

So as you've undoubtedly gathered by now, as we've been saying we were going to, we told our boss today that we're going to retire and we turned in our resignation, effective the end of June.  Thirty-day notice seems appropriate to terminate a 35-year career.

As we suspected, the news wasn't well received, undoubtedly in part (and here comes the synchronicity part) because our work colleague had also turned in his resignation today, just a few minutes before us.  To give you an idea of the momentousness of the twin resignations, we were the last two working employees left.  

We work (worked) for a small company.  There were only eight employees at the beginning of the year, the boss, an administrative assistant, a receptionist, and a manger, and four of what we called "professional employees" (i.e, the actual workers).  Not a sustainable model, we know - half the company is overhead management, supported by the other half who actually work and bring in the revenue.  But half of the four working employees resigned back in March, and the last two, my colleague and I, resigned today. There's no one left. The consulting company has no more consultants left on its staff.

But you could argue that the twin resignations are coincidence, not synchronicity.  But here's the thing: we still weren't 100% sure we were financially ready to retire and like almost everyone else in our shoes, we had some understandable self-doubt about whether or not it would all actually come together.  But the toxic work environment had become intolerable to us, and we much preferred the financial uncertainties of a possibly underfunded retirement to continuing to work where we were. But when we got home today, we found not one but four separate letters from Social Security in our mailbox, each of which informed us we were due annuities from four separate previous employers. Three of the four are for lump-sum payouts totalling a not inconsiderable sum (think enough for a new car, and a nice one at that) and the fourth is for a monthly stipend of very nearly $1,000 a month.   

We hadn't considered these annuities in our financial planning and it was a surprise to us, and it nicely completes the picture of our future income. So we'll counter-argue that it's not mere coincidence, but feels more like the cosmos reassuring us today that we had made the correct decision.  It feels like synchronicity, and like validation.

Of course, we are rational, science-based people, and it is coincidence, both the twin resignations and the timing of the annuity notices, but it's just more fun to call it "synchronicity."

But anyway, we're free!