Not Dad’s Retirement
Not Dad’s Retirement
Craig Stephens | Feb 16, 2023
If you’re in a career you don’t love, consider your investments as the foundation for your next life phase. You may not have saved enough to retire outright—but it may be enough to launch a second act.
My father retired from a 35-year teaching career in 2002, when he was 56 years old. He hasn’t worked a day since. For years, his retirement was the primary model for my retirement aspirations—until I realized my path needed to diverge. Like many dads, he worked a career he tolerated but probably didn’t love. It provided our family with a comfortable lifestyle in the suburbs of a low-cost-of-living city. Teaching enabled him to be ever-present during my youth, with summers off and time to coach my baseball teams. He took his pension and left teaching without hesitation when he reached retirement eligibility.
I missed his retirement celebration because I was halfway through a 14-month backpacking trip that took me to southeast Asia and South America. Upon my return, I was 27 years old, broke, unemployed and living with my parents.
Though my dating prospects were bleak, I had a finance degree and a few years of information technology (IT) experience in my back pocket. I was ready to return to the workforce. Inspired by my dad’s retirement, I set a goal to retire at age 55, one year earlier than he did, so I’d have the flexibility to travel the world again without the time constraints of salaried employment.
After six months of living with Mom and Dad, I landed a government IT consulting position in the Washington D.C. area, for which I was underqualified and overpaid. My salary snowballed. Backpacking the world trained me to live frugally. College finance courses taught me to contribute to my 401(k) and invest monthly surplus dollars into stocks. The foundations were in place to reach my retirement goal.
But one thing became apparent soon after I started my new job. I didn’t like government IT consulting. I worked on massive IT projects with hundreds of workers. My direct contributions rarely influenced outcomes or led to organizational improvements. I was a small fish in Lake Titicaca.
Job satisfaction was elusive. But I was okay with that because I mainly cared about the salary and benefits. The high earnings allowed me to save and invest to reach financial milestones. My IT career was the path of least resistance to early retirement.
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