My Trial Retirement

I last went to work 436 days ago on January 11, 2019. After 26+ years on the job, my company closed down. It was sad, but in many ways, it also felt like a gift. With an exceedingly generous severance package, I had the luxury of not needing to rush back into the corporate world. The freedom to spend my days however I wanted gave me the chance to experience what retirement would be like. I found out that it can be a very mixed blessing.

The Good

Since I didn’t need to conserve my precious paid time off, I was able to have two epic travel adventures. The first was a massive road trip around the country last winter. The experience was incredibly memorable, and I saw many beautiful sights, though I did almost kill myself on an icy road early one Montana morning.

For my second big trip, I took the Trans-Siberian railroad from Beijing to St. Petersburg, Russia. It was harder for me to pull the trigger on this one. The cost significantly ate into my severance, and the itinerary so audacious that it seemed daunting. Luckily, I found a great tour company, and words can’t express how phenomenal the journey turned out to be. (Though, I did use a ton of words to try here, here, and here.) Given everything going on with the Coronavirus now, I am so very thankful I took this trip when I did. 

I took some shorter vacations as well, to Key West (amazingly for the first time for this Floridian) and Portland for no reason other than I had never been there before. I was also able to visit my family multiple times. With my parents getting older and my nephews and niece way too close to being completely grown-up, these visits were a blessing.

Thanks to the government WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) program, I also had the chance to take several training classes. Receiving my PMP certification used up a good chunk of my training dollars, but I also took courses that let me dive deeper into the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. Hats off to New Horizons, a great organization that helps people who are going through, to use the polite term, a career transition.

Being able to spend more time on my writing was something I also looked forward to doing. I started this blog, which is something I enjoy working on, and wrote a couple of feature-length screenplays, which I think are good (but still not as good as they need to be). Thanks to a former co-worker, I took on some freelance writing assignments too. It was nice to get paid something for my writing. Unfortunately, that leads to…

The Bad

I had a vision of trying to make a go of it as a full-time freelance writer. I created a website for my fledgling little business, but that turned out to be more of a frustration than it was worth. My site was nice, but getting it to show up anywhere useful in Google search rankings was almost impossible. I spent quite a bit of time and more than a little money on improving my search results, but the best I could ever do was make it to the eighth page when searching for “Tampa Freelance Writer.” 

The Coronavirus has shown us that there are more than a few snake oil salesmen in the world. The freelance writing community has its fair share too. There are plenty of organizations that will give you the privilege of learning their secrets for only a couple hundred bucks. Their proven methods are guaranteed to attract clients!!! I tried a couple of them. Let’s just say I would rather go used car shopping than buy something from most of these people ever again.

I did find a few writing gigs here and there, but the sad fact is that they usually didn’t pay well. I was super excited to be accepted as a contributor at Study.com, where you write short articles on topics students are curious about. When I learned they paid a whopping $2.00 per piece, I was much less enthusiastic. The kind of person who cranks out crap by rewriting a Wikipedia entry in ten minutes could maybe make that work. When you spend an hour writing an informative piece about how Thomas Edison invented the movie camera, the economics are not so great.

The main thing I learned is that to really make a go at freelance writing, you have to pick a niche in one of the hot markets. Copywriting for health and finance companies are two of the top spaces. I simply could not imagine myself writing about the same things over and over again. It just wasn’t for me. If I really felt a passion for writing sales copy for clients, I could have paid someone to turn my website into a lead generation machine, become more of an entrepreneur, and found a way to make a go of it. The fact is that I much more enjoyed spending my days working on screenplays or writing blog articles about things like the top ten Alfred Hitchcock movies.     

I will continue with my writing and maybe find a way to make money off of it in the future. I may even reconfigure my blog to focus on a niche one of these days. We’ll see if I can force my wandering mind to focus in a single direction. Whatever I do, I am sure that sitting home alone in front of a computer all the time is not right for me. And that takes me to…

The Ugly

When I worked in an office, I enjoyed coming home to peace and quiet in the evening. But that solitude begins to take its toll when it’s all you know week after week. I’m the kind of person who is okay with a certain amount of social distancing (to use a suddenly hot term). However, sitting in front of a computer with no one to talk to except yourself or the idiots on the radio for extended periods is not healthy. I was surprised by how much I missed going into work every day and just interacting with people. 

Working also gives you a sense of purpose. You always have things to do and goals to achieve. In my trial retirement, I had to find that motivation on an almost daily basis. For the first few months, this was easy. I had several writing projects and things around the house that I wanted to tackle for years. Planning for my trips and taking classes were fulfilling activities. When the projects, training, and travel were over, though, it became harder and harder to find that reason to look forward to the day. There’s only so much TV to watch, books to read, and walks to take to fill your time. 

After receiving my PMP, I started volunteering for the Project Management Institute’s Tampa Bay Chapter. I considered volunteering for other organizations too, but I knew that the severance gravy train was coming to an end and that I would be going back to work. Nothing reminded me of that more than the money taken out of my bank account every month when my COBRA premium came due.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act is a horrible name for something useful. Being able to keep your health insurance after losing a job is a good thing. Paying the full price for the coverage is not. The $600+ a month I’m paying is much less than someone with a spouse and dependents, but it’s still far more than anyone should have to pay. This highway robbery only reinforced the fact that our health care system is broken, and tying insurance into employment is a horrible idea. But those are topics for another day.

Thankfully, financial pre-planning and my severance put me in a position to pay for my health insurance through COBRA for a good long while. But it’s not something I could sustain long term.

The Future

I’m going back to work tomorrow! Of course, I’ll be working from home for at least the first couple of weeks due to COVID-19, but I’m very happy to have found a job in these tenuous times. And based on my trial retirement experience, I am going to think about things differently when it comes to planning for my future.

I’ve always been a diligent saver and have taken great advantage of my 401k, which I rolled to an IRA after being laid off. I’ve been too timid to look at the balance in the last few weeks, but since I don’t plan to use the money for at least a decade, I’m confident it will more than rebound. Good retirement planning needs to be about much more than just money. It also needs to include how you plan to spend your days. 

When I finally retire from (hopefully) my new job, I don’t know what my life will look like. I’m sure it will involve travel, writing, volunteer work, maybe some part-time work, and who knows what else. I have plenty of time to figure it out. But I need to start to do that now and not just wait for it to happen. Along with the travel and the freedom my trial retirement provided me, I am grateful it led me to that realization too.