I wrote this update last night for LinkedIn to share with former coworkers and then to Facebook where friends and family are. I’m not trying to keep in touch with work folks so I felt it might be nice for some of them to see what an early retiree is doing – was out the door at 49 and turned 50 a month later. So often people leave work and you only hear of them via the grapevine if they get a job somewhere else. I want to be a positive example of early retirement. Maybe some of you all are interested in this example of what life was like for me right after early retirement…

Hello friends, how about a five month retirement update? I’ve been thinking about doing an update since it’s been a while since I gave notice my final month at CoStar. A few notable work dates have passed, such as a quarter past my last day and next month it’ll be two quarters since I left CoStar. But honestly, I’m retired and I’ve moved past those timeframes, five months it is.

I’m happy to report that it’s been quite quiet on the CoStar front. Work life moves on and I’m not needed.

Retirement has been great and busy. We had a great month in New York with Susan’s mother. We were happy to be back home in June but then quickly we turned around and did our Norwegian trip with a quick stop over in London for a few nights.

In London, we visited with David Zamula, who also retired from CoStar, and his wife Annette. That was a great visit. They are out near Wimbledon and that was going on during our visit. However, since we are not that interested in tennis, we went to museums instead during that rainy stopover.

We were 14 days in Norway traveling around on two fjord cruises, one ferry, a few busses and trains, plus two internal flights. We saw lots of country, great people, and wonderful towns. It reminds me of the southeast Alaska that I grew up in, except it has wonderful public transportation.

One notable thing in Norway is that they were selling King Crab in the seafood markets. It’s actually an invasive species. They think the crab might’ve escaped from Russian farms, but at this point, it’s open season on King Crab and they want people to trap as much as possible and get it out of the water. The King Crab has no natural enemies in the Atlantic.

We’re happy to get home at the end of July, but then turned around visited Susan’s mother in New York again for another week. Luckily, the blackberries and tomatoes were growing like wild.

Finally, we have been home now for about a month and 10 days and we are starting to get into a more home-based routine.

One of our friends gave us a membership to a 50+ learning group, so we started going to weekly breakfasts with that group as a social activity. It’s nice to see longtime retirees who are living great lives. Many are traveling throughout the summer and going to the types of places we would like to go to. They also have a hiking club that meets up on Fridays, so we’ve done some hiking with that group along with other hikes on our own or with friends.

We’ve started volunteering with the Arlington Food Assistance Center and another distribution site. AFAC has been on our list since we have supported them for many years but not had time for midweek volunteering. And the fall season started to ramp up for ushering at theaters, so we are doing that as well.

Honestly, we still have a good bit of downtime, which is great. I’ve been dealing with moving my websites off an ancient 2012 Mac mini (hosted) and dealing with the problems that created. I’m enjoying free time on the computer to dink around. Susan’s been relaxing, taking the time to watch lots of movies and plan out our schedules. Putting all of this on our shared schedule requires Susan knowing what is taking place, discussing it with me, signing up and adding it to the calendar.

We both received our annual leave payouts during our first month in New York. Susan’s pension is being paid each month, and I’ve started to pay myself a biweekly salary out of cash. That’s broken into two equal accounts, one for regular spending money, and another additional balance that I probably could spend with no harm to my retirement. Combined, that’s about 2.1% of my net worth.

I’ve also started to transition a quarter of my pay myself money to pull from stocks. I look at the great market and feel a little better using some taxable stock so as to not burn down all my cash during this strong market.

Since Susan has a health insurance offered as part of the federal retirement she’s been covering the $750 a month premium – that for the best Blue Cross Plan that covers all my Kidney Transplant medication. I cannot stress how comforting having access to affordable health insurance is. She has made adjustments on her retirement portal for the federal withholding which is part of the federal retirement process and added the state withholding which was not part of the process.

At some point, I asked Susan how she thinks retirement is going and she said something along the lines “It’s the best thing ever!”.