What Retirement is Really Like

New York Times reporter Paul B. Brown reviewed a book on January 13th that got me thinking. He didn't especially enjoy the read because, in his words: "Retiring early and successfully requires two things, she argues: knowing what you will do with your life without a paying job, and a lot of money to live on. Ms. Hester is terrific in explaining the first part; so-so on the second."

That got me wondering what he would write had he reviewed my book(s). But in light of that oversight by the NYT, I felt as though I should add these thoughts to the conversation and update one of the few remaining blogs I had authored - for you. So here is the second part of Building Wealth in a Paycheck-to-Paycheck World - the retirement part.

The last post I entered on this site happened almost six years ago. Since then, I have retired the site that would be considered as the main location for all of my financial thoughts. BlueCollarDollar.com (this link takes you to the Wayback Machine - my other work literary resume can be found at paulpetillo.com) was officially deleted for a number of reasons: 1) It was entirely written in html, which meant that I could not, as Google requested 2) secure the site and 3) make it mobile friendly. Because the site was hand built and WordPress was not available, the process of updating and recoding 1989 urls simply proved to be too much.

That, and I was still working in a job that was ramping up to take in excess of 60 hours of my work week. So something had to go and the BCD was shutdown. It closed with a Google Page Rank of 4 (SEO folks will understand what that means - the New York Times according to one page rank checker available for free is only a Page Rank of 5.)

If I had known what I know now, I may not have "retired" the site - because another retirement came my way just a couple of months ago. I have not written a word about it since the day I actually left - a post on Facebook garnered quite a bit of support, with the obvious exception of a single person who worked with me posting a word. It could be expected though considering the fear that surrounds everyone who is left working in that establishment. I will address this condition throughout this post.

So what is retirement really like from a person who wrote about how to retire for almost twenty years. The following post will be broken down into the following segments: Fear, Guilt, Assessment, and Conditions.

Fear
Most people who know me well enough to consider me more than an acquaintance know that I tend to hurdle forward without much in the way of fear. Psychology Today describes fear as :"an emotional response induced by a perceived threat, which causes a change in brain and organ function, as well as in behavior. Fear can lead us to hide, to run away, or to freeze in our shoes.

fear /ˈfir/ noun

an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief
that someone or something is dangerous,
likely to cause pain, or a threat.

Fear may arise from a confrontation or from avoiding a threat, or it may come in the form of a discovery." And while my lack fear is often seen as cavalier - just ask my former employer - it is really rooted in my inability to allow emotion to enter into the equation.

That does not mean that the emotional response of everyone around me would not be impacted. It was and is an ongoing issue, even if it after a number of months it has subsided somewhat. I have described my exit as inelegant however, compared to the way I was treated in the closing months of my employment, my reaction to the incredibly spineless offer made to me to "stay in the job and get fired or take a demotion and get fired later" on the Friday after a weeklong trip to the farthest reaches of the company. The third option in this increasingly hostile environment was to retire - without the cake.

Keep in mind, this job commanded almost 70 hours of my week so the withdrawal from the demands of assisting 132 locations in an almost innumerable amount of small-to-large crises, creating cost savings where there were previously none and advancing the most ambitious sustainability programs that the company (not just the division I worked in) was not going to be easy.

I was incredibly successful at everything I undertook or was assigned - with one exception: I could not converse in any meaningful way with the person who would ultimately determine my fate. This particular VP of Hair-on-Fire was a volatile and close-minded individual who seemed to discharge someone from her service based on each time she was passed over for promotion. Yes, age and gender also played a role and I do get that this is the time when women need to take a commanding role in leadership (which was a very white male forward operation - and in many ways still is). It is their time. I get it. It is long overdue.

And despite my unwavering commitment to the company, I failed at bowing down to her in the manner she expected. (I had no idea how to!) Nothing I did was unsupportive however successful I seemed to become in my own role. Nothing I did was for my own advancement - I was simply trying to do my best in a role that few understood in an environment that could have cared less how much money I was saving for the company in the execution of my duties. I was apolitical and that is not a good survival tactic. I'm also a man and we are inherently stupid. I did see myself as the best middle manager a company could hope for - too old to shoot for promotion and too close to retirement to discard my own self-described ambition to leave the company better than I found it.

So I spent the weekend online tidying up what I could, calling all of my directs (except one incredibly disloyal subordinate that I inherited from a previous supervisor) and reaching out to specific vendors to thank them for their help and patience.

On Monday morning, at 5am, I entered the office with just my laptop, credit card and ID badge - I knew there would be footage so the wearing of shorts and t-shirt helped dismiss whatever questions might arise - crafted a note to my direct supervisor, an ambitious self-determined person who I believe could have cared less about anyone but her own gain and in it, outlined the hostile environment in which I was forced to retire from earlier than I had intended. In my mind, I needed another four years just to shore up the financial aspect of this process. But I had been preparing for this moment for over a decade.

I was fearless.

However I did not accurately gauge my wife's own fears as well as I should have done. She had grown up in a household that had suffered financial instability and had a focus on money that went beyond the planning stages directly to the worry. I had no fear because I believed in my plan and followed my own advice.

So how financially prepared was I to walk away from a good, benefit-laden position? While I had managed to lock in a pension from another career I had retired from almost a decade earlier, which, if I lived to be ninety would be worth well over a million dollars.  Certainly nothing to sneeze about ad as far as pensions were concerned, it was well-funded and very well could last my whole life without interruption. My wife was drawing her Social Security. However, in my mind, this combination of income was my wife's retirement and the income I would provide to the mix would come in the form of my Social Security (which if I wait long enough will be substantial - in the $2200 per month range) and from my 401k, which is another $200k. We have a home worth a million dollars, which was to be sold as part of the retirement plan. This downsizing or whatever you want to call it will create a paid for house and an additional $400k in investable, nest egg cash. And we are incredibly healthy for our ages.

I was fearless. And yet, it is not about me.

So if I have a flaw in the plan I designed and wrote about for all those years it was the kids, all grown and yet somehow still dependent. The economic downturn in 2008, which prompted me to save even more despite the rash selling of assets that my coworkers were doing - even after they asked me what to do, coupled with the incredible rise in popularity of the Pacific Northwest that pushed the equity of my home higher also pushed the overall cost of living to untenable levels for those offspring. Two returned to the nest. And this has created a financial drain on the system I had in place. This was difficult to predict twenty years ago when we formulated this plan. But it is not a deal breaker by any means.

So my wife did worry and rightly so. She was angry with my (previous employer) and rightly so. She was all the emotion and that included fear that I was so comfortably devoid of. If you are planning for retirement, I do not believe you can anticipate this type of overriding anger even if the money is in place. She was pissed but I was grateful. I was fearless.

Guilt
Retiring means transferring to a new tribe. During the day, you are likely to encounter your fellow tribe members walking their dogs or simply strolling if the weather permits. As a young member of this new group, I am unaware of the language of retirement. I am not prone to complain, so that interaction will be limited to listening rather than sharing. That's fine; I'm a relatively good listener even if I tend to suffer when encountering stupidity.

This tribe is noticeably older looking than me. I know this because when I tell people that I am retired (which in concept I am; in principle I have only left my previous job), they say you look too young. They say the same about my wife when she reveals her age. So while the tribe is ours, we still feel as though we are fringe members.

The guilt I feel is not really guilt. I didn't do anything wrong nor am I offering an apology for anything. I imagine this feeling of doing something that I probably shouldn't be doing - enjoying my wife (I do have an intense regard for time and feel as though, if anything could be drawn from my early exit, it was getting these precious years to call our own), enjoying my big brain (I have novels to finish and a new business to run - more on that later in the Assessment section) and actually getting the house staged for sale - or for future comfort if we decide, for whatever reason, to hang in for several more years.

I feel guilty for having lived a really good life and for having followed my own (published) advice. I am an optimist and I have always felt guilty being one. To be an optimist according to Tali Sharot, writing in his 2011 book "The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain" is to allow ourselves to allow rational reasoning to be taken hostage, "directing our expectations a better outcome without sufficient evidence to support such a conclusion." So how does one view retirement if not as either an optimist or a pessimist?

The question that always made me most concerned - and plenty of colleagues continue to ask, pulling on an emotion that is both morbid and incalculable - was will you outlive your money? The answer should always be yes. Or as it is quickly redirected, will you have enough money to leave your heirs?

This is a source of guilt. If I retire, you might ask yourself, will you have done so:

• too soon;
• too late to enjoy;
• at the wrong time market-wise;
• or will I continue to work so long as to have my health threatened;
• where will I grow old;
• can I age in place.

These are all viable questions. However, they have no answers. You will never know until you are actually faced with the decision and its fortunate/unfortunate consequences. I might have retired too soon but I feel as though I am incredibly marketable (more on that later) and because I have done a good job with my health, I am physically able to do most jobs. This doesn't mean I will get one if I applied or that I will need one to achieve some sort of benefit (health insurance premiums are still moderately low at this point and although a job with benefits would alleviate those costs, the time spent to access this benefit does not seem worth it). It simply means that I can.

The second question focuses on what you enjoy and how this activity should be engaged. Some people have expensive hobbies and toys and that bears a certain cost. I do not have these expenses. Give a library and I will be happy.

Allow me to walk around town and I will be content. And let me find things that make my wife happy. The last expense could also be an unknown and you will never know whether you worked too long to fully enjoy your loved one(s). And because I have found the time I am spending with her now the best benefit of being retired, her retirement wishes need to be calculated as well.

Retirement is often broken down into three spending arrangements. Retirement is not about you, it is about the cost of you. For the first 35 years of our marriage, we traveled and visited many of the places we wanted to visited, often with kids in tow. I came to the marriage a world traveler and she came to it as an ex-stewardess for United. We've been around. But what would happen when we have time - and can afford to take our time when we do travel, unbracketed so to speak? She says she'll go anywhere with me but she doesn't really have the overarching desire to travel. Her domestic approach to this time in her life makes her happy. She laughs. A lot. So this cost does not really exist in our house. Dining out in this foodie-rich area of the world is travel enough - at $100 a trip. We don't eat that much these days so this is a reasonable night out at the best places.

The market-wise timing should not be a thing. It is however, a thing. It is often touted amongst financial types that the withdrawal rate of your retirement plan should be done with percentages - 4% a year is often used - so as to never run out of money.

Some experts break down the retirement years as go-go, slow-go and no-go. My wife and I are already in the slow-go stage and ready to take either exit ramp should there be any financial changes. I say slow-go due to the aforementioned lack of need to travel, an expense that is often among the first dollars spent at retirement age, the extended vacation in a bucket list sport somewhere worth bragging about and posting endless pictures of on FB. However, the fact that we skipped that stage should not matter either. 

At age 55, I began removing profits and shifting them into cash. The contribution I made to my 401k was increased with each pay raise so my involvement continued to grow. And this meant I was socking away 15%. (I am still surprised at the lack of involvement most people have in these plans, contributing only what the company might match.) The last time a raked off profits was at the beginning of 2018. This now amounts to 27% of my total savings and it will remain there. (I did get lucky as the market peaked at exactly the time when my rollover was taking place. I waited a couple of disaster market weeks before I put that money back in. This was NOT timing, just a series of events that worked out in my best interest. 

If you regret getting up in the morning to go to a job you more-or-less dislike, your health is being impacted. And even though my health is in good shape, I was not aware of how much that job consumed some valuable brain power and was not being appreciated. That is important and although my body was doing fine, my head was possibly waiting to break. I only know this after-the-fact and how good I actually feel these days.

My wife was asked when she retired four years ago whether she wanted to retire in place. She said she did. She has since changed her mind. Now the house is too big, too cold. We're in no hurry but we will be moving, and when we do so, it will be in an equally nice but newer home/condo and probably nearby. The house we live in currently does carry a mortgage and although many people feel as though you should own your home at retirement, our situation was different. We purchased this incredibly large home in what was not the most desirable neighborhood at the time for $72k - 3500 square feet at an interest rate of 14% in 1984. Numerous refinances brought the interest rate down to 3.5% and we now carry just the remodel costs of making the house worth a million. Remove those costs and you can see why the house is part of the plan.

Assessment

As I mentioned earlier, I spent the weekend - no, make that the week prior to my unplanned/planned exit - debating what I would do. The question of "what's next" often plagued my day-to-day activities. I cannot tell how often I sat at my desk contemplating what exactly I did. And even more importantly, how do I market these skills. I'm not sure others do this type of reflection. Seems to me that everyone I worked with within the organization had a clear idea of exactly what they did and how to vocalize those talents. Not me.

If you were to bump into me on the elevator, perhaps introducing yourself for the first time, I might describe my job as "saving money so someone else could spend it." Hardly an elevator pitch but it did sum up the complicated nature of the three words in my title. I managed expenses - which means straddling the fine line between bad daddy and giving stores what they need. Often, they did not know what they needed and responded to the daily trials they faced trying to run a business (that some leaders in the company suggested that they could not and would not do) and please those chaotic leadership directions. Calling me for help was the beginning of the juggling game - one request meant that another request would have to wait. In the budget I managed, we were the most profitable division - and, without sounding as if I was looking for a kudo or two for the way I did this job - no one said a word.

I managed sanitation. This involved ensuring that all the vendors responsible for the clean and safe operation of each location did their contractual job, often to the subjective reports filed by earnest store level employees trying to make their voice relevant. This part of the job dealt with everything from janitorial work to landscaping to pest control and literally everything in-between. Searching for objective reporting on the ground about these wide ranging functions was almost impossible. And god forbid a supervisor arrived at the exact same point some manager was having a subjective tantrum (often an overreaction and often an execution of that manager's team), the problem escalated in a very curious way. It went over my head and then back down to me. An easily solved problem became a shit-rolls-down-hill message from VP of Hair-on-Fire. Emails dinging my phone would arrive at nine or ten at night and require an answer within minutes. We were also among the top five cleanest division in the company and when you consider that our volume was three to four times the volume of other divisions, this was also worthy of a "hey, nice work." My wife tells me I have a martyr syndrome - and she is right.

However, when it came to sustainability, I was king-of-the-trash hill. There had been some semblance of a zero waste initiative in place prior to me taking the helm. It was almost simultaneous; the company introduced a cost reduction plan the would address fourteen lines of the thousands I was responsible for as a way to garner vast reserves of cash. They were right. I saw nothing but long hanging fruit when it came to the trash removal line. However, what I did not anticipate was the informational void I was about to enter, a place where anyone with a merchandising background, and this is the experience most everyone in this business has risen from, knew little about what happened to the waste they produced in pursuit of sales.

Each time I tried to update a supervisor, the blank look I received was noteworthy insomuch as it became a farcical report. Why was explaining the nuances of trash removal in terms of diversion, compactor upkeep and leak remediation - not to mention the pest issues that could and sometimes did enter the picture. I was not encouraged or discouraged. I was simply left increasingly to my own devices, reporting numbers on a periodic basis and experiencing disbelief as these costs dropped. I tried to coach my comments for those less versed in what would become my personally authored Zero Waste 2.0, a living document that was updated each month with new procedures and protocols, each vetted at store level for feasibility and executed with two green focuses in sight: Green for the profit via savings I was achieving and green for the environmental impact we were removing from the landfill. 

It was complicated.

Waste removal companies were not happy as their revenue dropped, at one point as much as $160k in one 30 day stretch. Businesses who had never seen an opportunity with the company were now vendors: styrofoam recovery involved two trucking companies and a recycler, hangar recycling meant finding resellers for discarded mixed materials that, before China decided that the U.S. was not sending recyclable material in the condition we agreed upon and stopped taking our "trash" and was conveniently deposited into a commingle compactor, waxed cardboard, plastic bags and film, and whole host of other materials. However, organic recovery was the lowest of hanging fruit.

If 60% of what my industry discarded by weight was not finding a different path, I was given no help in trying to fix that issue. I'm not sure anyone knew it was an issue. We had some compost compactors, expensive and prone to leaks. But not for 132 locations. I had exactly 12 stores doing something akin to removing the waste from the trash. My goal was 100. Why not all? Because despite living in a part of the country I sometimes referred to as the granola belt, organic recovery was not available.

I'm not going to share the successes that might be viewed as a release of information that should be kept confidential. What I did, almost unwittingly, was push FM to the forefront of the sustainability quest in almost every region we operated. We were becoming green heroes, the business that could be emulated, placed on a pedestal. Except, as I mentioned earlier, no one knew or understood or cared what I was doing. Saving money, saving the planet, promoting the greatness of the company did not matter to the people (VP of Hair-on-Fire) that mattered. And even though the hostility was palpable, I moved forward. Even as I was beginning to feel as though my age and even my gender might be an issue, I still advanced the projects, worked with the community and internal business partners in both PR and marketing to do more as leaders and allowed myself to become the corporate pioneer in this category.

There is an old saying: Once you do not matter to the people that matter, you no longer matter. And I had to walk away from the job of a lifetime. Or perhaps this analogy is better: I was discarded.

Conditions

Last night I met with two people who have made a significant impact in the world of sustainability. One helped me with the styrofoam project, the other was referred. And this is how it began. Recall how I regularly discussed with myself what and how to market this wildly diverse set of skills. Seems as if the ability I possessed in significant quantity, despite what appears to be an inclination to be a protean, was the most marketable. Zero Waste Consultants LLC was literally opened the day I left. The site was bought and built before noon of the same day I dropped off the last vestiges of a career that was driven by a consistent fear that each misstep was a step closer to the door. I suppose this is the case with most businesses but this one, where being replaced was always an option, as if every meeting was shadowed by someone' resume looming over your shoulder, someone not so much better qualified as a person who had not pissed anyone that matters yet. Building a site such as this in hours might seem daunting however, business on the web was nothing new to me. (I have an online resume here at paulpetillo.com).

And because I inherently dislike Facebook and prefer the LinkedIn environment, I began taking my thoughts on a wider, more diverse journey designed to attract clients. Due to the fact the vast majority of my online experience was delivery relevant, SEO friendly content. I did it for myself over numerous websites I owned over the last 20 years. I did it for other businesses as diverse as paddle boards and real estate. I did it for other sites that had an interest in the financial thinking I was espousing. In these posts, I took on the previous roadblocks I had encountered and began to formulate my ideas to improve the overall world of recycling.

What was amazing was how many people from my former employer's office were paying attention. I get it.

A screenshot of some of the analytics provided by LinkedIn on
who viewed what I posted.

I did some amazing things in my previous position - so much so that when I did strike out on my own in the same field, people reached out. In fact, the concept of bridging the gap between the people who control the purse strings and the people tasked with a company's sustainability in the form of consultation was proving viable.

This has not completely settled and there is still quite a lot of determining how to proceed. My services are needed in the organic recovery effort that some businesses feel as though they are participating in even if they are still failing to remove as much as 40% of the recoverable wasted food (I do prefer the term wasted food over the popular terminology of food waste - because this product is not the end of the line by any means) that is still headed to the landfill. Also, these businesses are tempting fate and lawsuits by sending unexamined food stuffs to animal farms. There is a liability there and the food industry has not embraced this issue - and consumers have not either.

My experience is also needed in the plastics industry. This particular area has an image problem, a logistics issue and a lack of governmental support to achieve a circular economic model. I wrote in a recent post that the price of oil - drill baby drill, or frack baby frack - will be a headwind for this industry and our landfills and our oceans and worse, for future generations. But I have an idea how to fix that as well.

And then there is the novels. I have self-published two of the three books in a trilogy that explores a person's moral dark side. The third is awaiting editing and will be ready to publish in the next month of so. Now that I have a few free hours to devote to selling the idea - and the fourth novel that kills the protagonist in a made for Netflix conclusion to that journey is waiting in concept and is two hundred pages in draft.

Will I go back to work? Possibly. I know what I want to do know moving forward and it will not involve being a martyr for another VP of Hair-on-Fire. There are people who want to change the world and there are people that want to enrich themselves. I want to find people to work with that want to do both.

However, if I was to draw a conclusion from the long essay - one that could be the germ of a follow-up to my first books. Who knows? I have followed my own advice and I have the whole world in front of me and it is mine to do what I want. And I did it without ever earning six figures in any given year - ever.

I will say though, that having my wife with me, someone who laughs and cries freely, my emotional muse who feels things that I do not, jumps at scary movies that do not seem to phase me, acts independently of what others think but somehow at the same time, cares what others think. She is as real people as a person could hope for, fully formed and fragile and strong. I have dedicated every book I have written, every breath I have taken and the reason I rise in the morning.

So that is what retirement is really like. At least what mine is.